I live in SF & read these articles, which all have a tone of “What is to be done?” They seem reluctant to draw unpopular conclusions, even if those conclusions are inevitable. So here, I’ll tell you what’s going to happen.
Downtown as a healthy fully occupied business district is dead. Cause of death: remote work. You can wait 50 years if you want and see if it comes back, but it never will; there’s no going back.
You can’t harangue workers into reversing that, and you can’t browbeat business owners into paying for space that goes unused.
If you assume a lack of business renters being able to occupy the space or live off the people coming do business there, there’s only one customer base left: residential.
“But it’s hard to retrofit”, “we’ll have to redo the laws”, etc. Well, ok. You can wait to see if things will change, but they won’t. Eventually the property owners, and a city in need of tax revenue, are going to have to come to terms with the new reality.
When they do, even if it’s three decades from now, there will be more housing in that area. It will keep the streets filled, it will keep crime down, and it will bring in tax revenue… eventually. It’s anybody’s guess how long that will take, however.
I agree. I don't know what it would take to retrofit but don't NYC and LA have lots of old office buildings turned into tready lofts?
The Financial District and especiallyunion square area could be amazing if it was zoned for residential with commercial on the first floor. Parts of it could easily rival some of the nicer neighborhoods in Europe. For the larger buildings, make every 6th floor a shared space, put a restaurant/bar/clubhouse on the roof for residents to use and rent.
There are already a number of office building to condo retrofits in midtown Manhattan. And some of the largest oldest office towers in the financial district such as 70 pine are fully residential now
The site seems to have a very odd sprinkling of English headings and words. Not enough for a non-Japanese reader, and no visible option to switch to an English version of the pages, so clearly targeted Japanese-only. Is this common?
Yes- very, particularly in advertising, presumably because it stands out. The longer answer is that Japanese has a few different writing systems, and one of those is already used most often for transliterated "loanwords" that came from other languages. There are a ton of English words that get written in katakana and are used quite frequently, like hamburger (ハンバーガー) and premium (プレミアム). For some of the English words that are likely to be the most well-known, it's not a crazy step to use the latin character set instead to write them, for extra emphasis.
I've been watching a number of the Taskmaster spinoffs in other countries- Norway, Portugal, Croatia, Belgium, etc- and one thing they all share in common is a tendency to randomly blurt out English words or phrases- most frequently in an exclamatory manner even though the show isn't targeted at an english audience and the people aren't native english speakers.
I haven't watched much Korean TV, but iirc it's not exactly uncommon in Korean music either.
I assume it's "cool" given the prevalence of English media, probably varies quite a bit by region.
It seems premature to say this with confidence, though. Last time I saw the stats, remote work overall is down to 10% and still dropping pretty fast. Yes, prevalence is higher in the tech world, but still, we should wait until it stabilizes (especially with an incoming recession) before proclaiming that two years of remote work has changed the world.
It might be premature, but it seems like the cat is out the bag, especially if it means lower operating costs for businesses. Everything in the near future points to cash-flow positive businesses being the Wall Street darlings. Being unprofitable is no longer in vogue, which is a pretty seismic shift for the bay. If you don't need the office space, you're going to get undercut by your competitor who goes without. Besides staffing costs (which also go down when you hire technologists from outside of Bay Area), your second biggest software company cost is going to be office space.
I think the comments on Hacker News tend to suffer from Selection Bias of the most Online engineers. I wouldn't trust the highest voted comments as an accurate depiction of reality. In the same regard, I wouldn't trust any comment as an accurate depiction of reality.
> Besides staffing costs (which also go down when you hire technologists from outside of Bay Area)
That's not what I've seen. Top talent still commands SF salaries, no matter where they happen to be located.
So far everyone I've seen try to implement Geo-adjustment magically had to carve out "special" deals for most engineers. They won't talk about it openly of course.
I mean, most of the jobs went to the suburbs in the 90s because of cost and convenience, then boomeranged back to the city for (culture? fun? actually idk why; I liked suburbs better). So, no reason history won't repeat itself.
A lot of urbanists overlook the way online culture and modern logistics have brought so much of the "culture" (good ethnic cuisines and food trends) to the suburbs and even exurbs in weeks/months instead of the 10+ years trends used to take to travel.
Anyone who grew up in the burbs in the 70s-90s and goes back today can observe this.
Anecdata - I have a sibling who lives in fairly rural MAGA country outer exurbs and yet has both bubble tea & pho shops in driving distance.
Similarly "well everything is so far in the burbs".. ok well, I've lived nearly 20 years in NYC and my average commute has been about 40 minutes. All my friends live all over the 5 boroughs, most of which are a good 30-40 minutes by uber or subway. We mostly see each other weeknights after work in midtown/downtown since thats closer.
Remote or even 2-day in-office hybrid work makes the trade offs of being 30~60 miles outside the city much more attractive.
The city has many conveniences and also a ton of inconveniences, it doesn't take a lot to put the balance out of whack and make you question why you pay so much for it.
Go walk around SoMa and report back. Return to office is not going to happen there. It was too expensive, too crowded, too unpleasant. Everyone took the opportunity presented by the pandemic to peace out.
It’s never coming back. Companies that know have been shutting their SF offices. Once it starts it’ll become a positive feedback loop. And it’s well underway.
An added wrinkle is that the city is addicted to spending. When income drops they’re in for a rude awakening. Already dysfunctional government offices will cease to function entirely.
SF is headed for some dark times.
The article has data showing that the number of access card swipes in buildings in downtown SF is 30% of what it was pre-pandemic. Whether or not the 10% statistic you cited is true, it's definitely not true in downtown SF.
Yeah…and while prices are still so high and the state of downtown is still so poor, it’s a tough sell for residential, too. SF isn’t worth what it thinks it is, and that’s the trouble.
(Bias: I moved out in 2020, even though I was rent controlled at 2012 prices. The city was great at 2012 prices, but we knew leaving meant never coming back. Even so, QOL has improved a lot since leaving.)
> SF isn’t worth what it thinks it is, and that’s the trouble.
Isn't that by definition false? If living here was worth less, rents and home prices would drop. Sure, rents dipped quite a bit during the pandemic, but they've recovered somewhat, possibly completely. Home prices didn't change much. And yes, I know that these costs are propped up by things like zoning, the city planning process, NIMBYism, etc., but that doesn't really matter: there's still -- somehow -- enough demand to keep prices as high as they are.
(Bias: I bought a condo in the Dogpatch in 2020, right before the pandemic hit. I've been really happy with our QOL since moving, even during the pandemic. The neighborhood has mostly recovered, with only a few businesses closing permanently.)
I mean, I'm not shorting SF real estate, but no, valuation can be wrong and also not tautological. There are lots of reasons in SF that prices don't adjust - e.g. rent control and the tax advantage of unoccupied buildings vs accepting a permanently lower rent. There's lots of reasons that value doesn't adjust quickly.
> Downtown as a healthy fully occupied business district is dead.
You’re right, and it’s been true for a long time. Remember, it took the city approximately 30 years to remove the Embarcadero Freeway, even though its removal was first proposed in 1963. And the only reason they fully executed on this plan was because the damage from the Loma Prieta earthquake forced their hand in 1989.
Not to mention that the Embarcadero freeway was a horrific blight on the walkability of the city and our use of the waterfront. Now that it's gone, absolutely nobody misses it. The same might be said in the future about revitalizing downtown around residential life, but that's not enough to get a city to take major action. I don't know what my point is here, except that positive change can be slow.
> Downtown as a healthy fully occupied business district is dead. Cause of death: remote work. You can wait 50 years if you want and see if it comes back, but it never will; there’s no going back.
Remote work reduces demand for downtown office space, but where is evidence that it reduces it below supply?
Demand was very high - downtown office space was very expensive. Many businesses that would love to open up or move downtown previously couldn't. Now they can.
Cheap inputs like office space, in a great city with great transit, etc., with proximity to other businesses and services, is a perfect place for entrepreneurs and startups. This economic change could unexpectedly, at the height of SV costs, create a low-cost community of startups right in SF.
It's speculative, but so is the doom and gloom. The first who see the opportunity when everyone else is wailing and gnashing their teeth will be the ones to cash in. Maybe me!
Plenty of office space is being used nationwide. I’m fine going into my New York or Mountain View offices. I would not want to commute into or around San Francisco.
If there's enough demand for it (and risk appetite), change can happen swiftly. Just see how rapidly the Mission transformed (particularly Valencia-Dolores and adjacent) over the past decade.
> If there's enough demand for it (and risk appetite), change can happen swiftly. Just see how rapidly the Mission transformed (particularly Valencia-Dolores and adjacent) over the past decade.
Valencia-Dolores was just fine before the gentrification. A better analogy would be the comparatively quick tear down and demolishment of the Embarcadero Freeway, which had formerly been a blight on the city for decades and blocked the beautiful waterfront. Once it was torn down and that area redeveloped, hardly anyone can imagine a good rationale for ever building it in the first place. That’s one of the greatest success stories of modern San Francisco, and it’s likely the downtown area can benefit from the same approach. People didn’t want to hear that about the Embarcadero Freeway and fought against bringing it down for years, but in retrospect, everyone now knows they were dead wrong.
Those residential units would be full of people remote working so the satellite businesses (cafes and what-have-yous) could theoreticaly stay in business.
The reality is that a building owner doesn't want to lower the asking rent because it will devalue the building. They make more money owning a building with high rents than they lose having it sit empty. Nobody actually checks if these "high value" real estate properties on paper are actually occupied.
Honestly this seems like unmitigated blessing that there's so much spare real estate to alleviate the monstrous shortage of housing. SF was a vibrant, thriving city with a ton of character before it became the new Babylon of the technology era. It could stand to lose 50,000 tech bros and let some families and earnest weirdos move back in.
As someone who has been in tech for ages, and yet also knew SF before its current state..I'd be happy with an influx of families and earnest weirdos. I feel the same about San Jose too.
There’s still a risk of being the next Detroit. Those office spaces didn’t need schools. Didn’t need showers, laundry. As you retrofit the cities cost goes up and tax revenue might decline further. Leading to a slow death event.
Sf would be smart to make deep cuts now to free up budget. Going as far as putting a ballot initiative to end maybe prior proposition earmarks.
Is this contradictory to the reason that startups are funded in S.F proper? I remember many articles and social media posts were saying along the line that people chose to work in S.F because they loved bustling city life. Yet the city is doomed because people wanted to work remotely en masse?
Startups are founded in Northern California because of easy access to VC money and an extremely strong talent base. I don't know what the numbers are but I would be surprised if there are more startups in SF proper and not San Jose and its suburbs (the real economic heart of the Bay Area, honestly) and out in the East Bay.
San Fransisco is fun but a big pain in the ass to get to and live in, even compared to the rest of the area.
> Startups are founded in Northern California because of easy access to VC money and an extremely strong talent base.
And the illegality of non-competes. And the fact that your off-hours IP is yours.
One thing that tech people are forgetting is that California law may not apply to them in remote situations and there are a bunch of protections that you get when you are subject to California law.
If you don't think the corporate lawyers are already working this angle, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you ...
I mean that just plays into the talent pool - people who are willing and able to join or found a startup.
While I think what you're talking about is a big deal and the biggest mistake every state that wants a tech industry fails at (yet New York, Massachusetts, and DC/Virginia seem to do ok), a bigger one is the fundamental culture of Californian tech. Most other parts of this country, people are too scared to take the risk to leave the "good" job for a startup. It's a negative feedback loop that dampens any chance of growth. California is the one place where people feel safe enough to ditch a good job for a cool one, and it pays in spades for the state.
This explains why the Bay Area attracted so many startups, but does not necessarily explain why in the past 10 years more startups were founded in the SF proper instead of in the south bay.
People got a taste for how good remote work can be. That changed people’s priorities. Before, we were (mostly) blissfully unaware, or at least partially sold on the idea of office life being preferable.
Perhaps half of SF office workers were commuting in before the pandemic? Too lazy to research the numbers but certainly some large chunk just doesn't want to bother driving in every day.
My prediction is remote work won’t last. Maybe for specific workers and tech must be the last, but other office jobs? They’ll be a slow but growing expectation to be in the office and the folks that show up will be the ones getting the desirable projects, the promotions and raises.
It might take a few years until we get there, but we will.
I’ll take an office job when by travel time is taken off my work week/fully paid (including car/bus/w/e costs). But that job would also have to have affordable and desirable housing commensurate with the compensation.
What we’re actually going to see is a division better highly skilled people going to companies that understand what humans need and lesser skilled or otherwise problematic employees settling for the less desirable jobs with backwards looking management and worse total compensation packages/work life balances. These regressive companies will slowly implode due to cancerous cultural issues that will blossom wonderfully when toxicity is given the fertile ground of desperate and problematic staff coerced into interacting in bullshit jobs.
My prediction would have been different 2 years ago. Pre-COVID, I worked on a few 100% remote teams, and it worked great.
COVID didn't do what I expected. Instead of online learning moving into the mainstream, we got emergency crappy online learning, and the world burned out on online learning. Everyone now believes it can't be done.
All the businesses I worked with switched to WFH, equally poorly. In my current job, working from home, I feel isolated and asocial. I hate it. That's true of many coworkers as well. It's not the fault of remote work, but it's the fault of the very poor implementation of remote work at my employer.
I don't really know anyone who (openly) believed that online learning was going to be successful.
Online learning is fine for adults who have developed sufficient mental discipline and focus, especially college style where you're in classes only a few hours a day.
Expecting 7 year old kids and teenagers to sit in front of a computer screen and suffer through what effectively amounts to 7 hours of meetings is asinine- they can barely do that in person, where the number of distractions is far fewer.
OTOH, I will never go back to an office, full stop. The commute isn't worth it, and being in person more than a handful of times a year (tops) isn't worth it. I'm a fairly introverted person by nature, though, and my dogs and wife are home during the day, so I don't really get any sense of isolation.
> Online learning is fine for adults who have developed sufficient mental discipline and focus, especially college style where you're in classes only a few hours a day.
And even then. Do you remember in the early 2010s with the rise of edX, Coursera and co when one of the founders was predicting that in 20 years almost all learning will be online, universities will ho bankrupt and close with less than 50, including the online ones, remaining?
The reality is that the vast majority of adults can't be bothered to maintain their motivation and finish an online course. The stats on course completion rates are abysmal. I've been there, of course, I have enrolled into probably more than 10 different courses, all of which sounded very interesting, but none of which i was motivated to see through the end.
It's worth noting "the founders" were mostly figureheads who took over from the actual founders through power plays, and knew nearly nothing about online learning, or much of anything other than corporate politics.
The original founders built platforms which worked pretty well. In the end, MOOCs were videos and multiple choice questions. No one can stomach that.
The original Stanford AI course, from Norvig/Thrun, did pretty okay. Coursera steamrolled Udacity by building a massive number of crappy courses.
The first edX course, 6.002x, mis-attributed to Agarwal but mostly built by Sussman/Mitros/Terman, did even better. Within a few years, edX was run by corporate types who did massive numbers of crappy courses.
The actual founders had bold plans for how to make the platforms and courses even better, but those never panned out, due to politics, incentives, etc.
Keith Rabois and David Sacks and all of the other billionaire VCs who love to whine and complain about SF on twitter are nowhere near the crime (which is totally blown out of proportion). These guys own $20-30MM homes in Pacific Heights which is one of the poshest neighborhoods in the world. They're complaining because they're used to being able to pay for perfection - perfect dinners, perfect vacations, assistants and workers who do exactly as they're told, and SF is frustrating because if you live here you can almost see how it could nearly be the perfect city, but no amount of money can make it perfect - there is no such thing in reality as perfection and these VCs are pissed that they can't throw money at it and make it so.
> If a majority of the votes on a recall proposal are “Yes,” the officer is removed and, if there is a candidate, the candidate who receives the highest number of votes is the successor to the unexpired term of the recalled officer.
(Cal. Const., Art. II, Sec. 15;
Elections Code §§ 11381(c), 11384, 11385)
One of the highest property crime rates in the country is blowing it out of proportion? It's factually, actually, truly a crime ridden shithole; as much of one as a US city can be.
Your source seems to say SF is #37 of 100, when sorted by crime per population.
Large cities with crime rate higher than SF, according to your source: Detroit, Baltimore, Memphis, Indianapolis, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Dallas, Los Angeles, Phoenix.
Your source says St Louis has a crime rate 2.9x higher.
Maybe consider that you just hate SF, for your own personal reasons?
(And your source is based on voluntary reporting, so there's huge biases there. SF sounds like the kind of place that could manage to push for more transparency..)
37 is violent crime. When you sort by property crime, the type of crime I wrote in my post, it is number 4. Maybe consider that you didn't read the source carefully for your own personal reasons?
That’d make a good backdrop for a comedy / startup story or unlikely friends sitcom. Queue a bunch of young nerds living in an SCO trying to make it big. A couple cubicles over would be the crazy non-techy for comedic relief, etc. ;)
Honestly, not knowing SF (European with very few visits in the USA so far) my point is for all cities build demand time, years, decades in general, things change normally not that fast but change anyway and adapting cities to different (changed) societies it's next to unfeasible.
Surely, something can be done, normally with big effort compared to the final outcome, but not more than that.
In the very past was easier: rate of change was FAR slower, cities was built with rocks and some wood, the very same rocks can be "moved" to build something different and woods can be sourced nearby. The city was able to rebuild itself. Normally after some catastrophe. Modern cities tend to be steel and concrete, not easy to be "reused" especially locally. As a result modern cites need to be rebuilt from the ground today and IF we accept such enormous challenge when they'll be rebuilt will probably be not good anymore because tech and so business/needs are already changed.
In the recent past the idea of a thriving city was simply: we have living places and commerce concentrated, if tomorrow a certain family of shops became obsolete and disappear others will occupy the same places with minor changes, like we do not have anymore the need for stearic candles but at their place light bulb shops arrive, we do not have much classic restaurants and at their place small kitchen for ready-made food delivery take their place etc. That's effectively worked for a certain amount of time. Factories are outside, they have room to change, agriculture have room to change and people live in cities.
Now such model is in crisis, climate change force new kind of homes, it's not just a matter of changing windows and some appliance. New small homes are easier to rebuild, you crush the old one, build another at the same place. Tall buildings are another story and most cities are made of tall buildings especially downtown.
That's the real crisis, it's not a matter "due to remote work some offices are empty and activities around them can't survive": no one take this places because it's not anymore a simple "economical shift" in the same model.
Since we dream a future of flying cars density for economy of scale will be FAR LESS dense than now and that's give the ability to change, cities can only be small/medium and on-purpose, like classic manufacturing districts.
The really unpopular part is the fact that in such model too many will be new poor and of course they do not like such idea, we do not like that being not so sure for ourselves since even wealthy today a big shift might be hard to sustain.
"2021 Downtown Detroit is cleaner and safer than Downtown San Francisco" - Peter Santenello on YouTube! I agree with him. Reference: https://youtu.be/GnFGYqj2UQA?t=272
As someone pre-COVID regularly travelled between Detroit and SF I'd have to agree. Rents for really nice apartments, places with doormen and gyms, are 60-70% less than really basic ones in SF. They're also less likely to raise rents for awhile as there's a ton of new apartments that will be available in the next 12-24 months downtown.
I've also never seen a tent on the sidewalk in Detroit. South of Grand Circus Park is a big startup area. To be fair I have found trying to cross the park in the evening to reach restaurants on the other side I've quite often had to deal with very aggressive panhandling homeless people. I've never encountered this problem elsewhere in the city.
Here's another video by the same guy where he meets an ex-convict who is building a real estate empire one house at a time.
In-office work can make a comeback. All big tech has to do is tell new college grads "you have to work in our office." They will agree. After a few years and all the remote workers are sidelined and not important.
This strikes me as a very strange take. Isn't it like saying "The 6 day workweek can make a comeback. All employers have to do is..."
The issue is that once a particular practice in relations between capital and labor becomes ingrained, conditions of competition make it very difficult to shift the balance. You would effectively have to have a non-competition agreement between big tech companies over this clause, because highly paid workers can and will leave for perks like remote work.
Not really. It's kind of what eroded the power of US industrial unions. In the 1970s many companies started hiring (with the grudging acceptance of the unions if their existing members got to keep their benefits) new workers with less benefits and less job security than previous workers. Within a generation the expectations for health plans, retirement, and paid vacations were reduced and the new workers if anything resented the older workers rather than their employers.
This is like saying offices can make a comeback after the industry went all in en masse for open plan. The stated reason for open plan was the mythical 'organic interaction,' but in reality it was reduced seating costs.
Remote work takes that those seating costs right to zero, and it's already been proven out with ample data demonstrating that productivity suffers little, if at all. There are a plethora of multi-billion companies that are 100% remote to really drive this point home.
In-office work isn't coming back any more than personal offices with doors for individual contributor engineers are coming back.
I'm still absolutely furious that SF managed the boom times by handing over massive amounts of cash to landlords and property owners, by restricting construction, that came directly out of the pockets of workers and has resulted in massive displacement.
Sure, the tax revenue looked great, but it happened in a way that caused great human suffering by making occupancy in the city zero sum, and awarding it to only those who had the most money to pay. That's not how it had to be, and choosing a zero-sum economic system rather than positive sum was foolish, and only meant to appease those with conservative views on construction. And by basing tax revenues on the business cycle, SF is now at such great risk, with huge social spending needed to repair the damage it inflicted with this unnecessary zero-sum system.
Sadly, those who will be hurt the most by a potential downturn are not those who benefited by setting up a bad system. A downturn will help nearly no one, and cause great suffering. I feel a little sick in my stomach when I hear some hoping for a downturn, either as a chance for them to finally buy real estate, or as a chance for S.F. to be made great again by returning to some imagined past. Both of these are very unlikely, especially the second.
Genuine question: How much of this caused Prop 13?
We bought a home in the Bay Area a few years ago. We considered the pros/cons of moving out of state and one pro of staying here was Prop 13 in California. We plan to retire in this home and figured Prop 13 will help make our post-retirement living expenses negligible.
I only recently had the realization that Prop 13 could cause some serious problems like cities being incentivized to encourage resident "turnover" because new residents would be subject to current level property taxes.
Another issue is cities having to rely more on sales taxes which discourages building residential housing and encourages building of commercial properties. Also when a recession hits then the cities are hit even harder because they aren't able to collect those sales taxes.
We found that Bay Area schools are begging for money constantly and theorized that very low property tax income is a big part of that too.
I mean... I like paying less but something about it feels wrong. Property taxes are a big source of income are they not?
Prop 13 is one of the legs of the stool of most dysfunction in California.
Some of these are gonna spark controversy but term limits, the recall and ease of passing propositions are some of the other ones.
The legislature is no longer professional enough to govern, so the people do it at the ballot box, at the behest of whom ever has the most money to spend. The fact that California is a single party state because of realignment and radicalization on the right makes all of this worse.
Whenever I go back to the Midwest to visit family, I always feel very wealthy given just how much cheaper everything is. Leave the coffee shop literally spending half as much and it’s like “holy cow this is great!”
Obviously, a person living in the area is usually making less so it’s all relative.
Terms limits are a red herring. They punish good and bad candidates, and don't actually help the problems with the elected class: campaign funding and competitive districts/gerrymandering.
Wanna know what its a "single party state"? Because one of the major parties, up until Pete Wilson, acted like a real party, then became a caricature (the GOP had 40+ percent of the state and registrants for ages, which is how guys like Nixon, Reagan, Deukmajian, Schwartzenegger etc all got elected) but now comprise less than 25% of the state registered voters (although many are now independents with a center-right lean) and the GOP leadership in the state are utterly oblivious clowns who live in rural bubbles like the Northern areas that want to start a neo-fascist Confederate Idiocracy with Eastern Oregon and Southern Idaho, or urban derp-bubbles like West Orange County and Torrey Pines, who just want brown people to tend to their golf courses and think Ayn Rand is one hot bitch. The Democrats in California, a party with near zero internal coherence, and no real stability at all, win because the Koch-knobs and Trumpkins that "lead" the opposition are as inane and insane as they are.
Yes and: Disempowering legislators empowers administrators and lobbyists. Power is zero sum.
I supported term limits until I saw first hand how agency heads run circles around legislators.
Now, I advocate making legislators more powerful, more independent, and therefore less dependent on lobbyists, contributors, and agencies.
Make legislating a real, full time job. More resources for staff, to help mitigate infoglut and provide real constituent services. Etc, etc.
> campaign funding and competitive districts/gerrymandering.
Absolutely. I advocate pretty much all the good government reforms. Public financing of campaigns, approval voting for executive positions, proportional representation for assemblies, restoring fairness doctrine, open government as default (eg something like data.gov for most everything). Etc, etc.
PS-
Lawrence Krubner's blog Demodexio is really good. Dives into nonobvious, nonsexy, common sense fundamental structural reforms for democracy, elections, and policy work.
So far, Krubner's advocacy matches my own experiences and observations. Here's just one great example:
Should the votes from voters combine on a per-issue basis, rather than a per-party or a per-candidate basis? [2022/05/13]
Why did Kenneth Arrow think that Approval Voting would do a better job of bringing to the surface the real concerns of voters?
> the GOP had 40+ percent of the state and registrants for ages, which is how guys like Nixon, Reagan, Deukmajian, Schwartzenegger etc all got elected
The last is really not true; Schwarzenegger was elected well after the California Republican Party had durably stopped trying to appeal to California voters in a way that could win statewide elections or legislative majorities and instead committed itself to appealing to the most extreme of the national Republican donor class. That's why they (and particularly Darryl Issa, who hoped to used it as a vehicle for his own election) funded the recall drive, aiming for an opportunity where they wouldn't actually need to get more votes than retention to win.
But once the recall was set, Schwarzenegger, who had basically no connection to the institutional Republican Party, swept in and blew away the establishment Republicans (leading to Darryl Issa’s literally tearful exit from the race that he has spent $1.7 million out of his own pocket to make happen).
> The Democrats in California, a party with near zero internal coherence, and no real stability at all, win because
Largely of the lack of internal ideological coherence and stability, making them able to run at least one candidate that fits the moment and district in any given election.
"Schwarzenegger was elected well after the California Republican Party had durably stopped trying to appeal to California voters"
No, but his tenure helped to foment their internal confusion about where to go. Arnold himself refused to play a party line game, and that in turn led to ever larger fissures between the national RNC and the State leadership.
Compare the quality of legislation passed before term limits to after (the last real structural reforms to state government were before term limits), I remember the difference. The current system encourages "make a name for yourself than move on to bigger and better things" and prevents the legislature acting as a base of political power - that gets in the way of long term thinking.
To the rest of your comment - I think big tent parties are good, but not ones that require ideological fealty the way current parties do, you can't build a durable majority with left social issues, a weird mashup or left wing and right wing economics and "progressive" requirement that everyone hew to proper "optics".
That's a recipe for never fixing any of the actual problems, with the added benefit of giving your base and activists plenty of ideological wars that can never be won.
> Compare the quality of legislation passed before term limits to after
After is generally better, at least than in an equal time period before, though I don't attribute it to term limits, which were a bad idea.
> the last real structural reforms to state government were before term limits
The last major structural reform to state government was when it was finally made modestly governable by the repeal of the supermajority budget requirement in 2010, 14 years after term limits applied to the Assembly (a little over two full turnovers forced by term limits), 12 years after they applied to the Senate (one full turnover and halfway through the next.)
The last major structural reforms of government administration (which may be more what you are thinking of, though of less practical effect) were a series under Schwarzenegger in 2005 (or so, not sure they all happened that year), still well after term limits.
He himself did not reform too much, but not for lack of tying. In the end one could easily argue that he helped mainline numerous ideas that had been previously flat out obstructed by the GOP: redistricting guidelines/gerrymandering (wanting to tae the districting process out of party hands altogether), environmental efforts (Global Warming Solutions Act), proposed marijuana legalization, opposed Bush IIs border fence initiatives..in a way he's very California: very immigrant, very Hollywood, very macho but a little hippy, weirdly contrarian and unapologetic about it.
He was not the most effective governor, but he also was not a destructive or fundamentally divisive one (yes he had soe hot points but I can't think of a single governor of this state who hasn't) and he certainly performed better than I thought he would.
Yeah, that was more or less my point. He was a decent governor, but he didn't fix (or really attempt to fix) the structural issues in Sacramento, I do think reasonably highly about him. Though I voted to retain Davis, Davis lost his office because of how bad he is at retail politics.
They are indeed part of the problem. Once people get it out of their heads that California is a pure "blue" state and has in fact had a complex political history with a lot of moving changes, including many by the GOP, than it rapidly becomes less obviously a red or blue issue, but a very deeply purple one with no one lacking exposure.
California was the home of Reagan and Nixon, and their legacy on state politics lives on to this day.
As mentioned, Prop 13 was a libertarian tax revolt that continues to cause massive structural problems in the state's economy, which only gets papered over by the absolute dominance of the economic productivity of massive innovation. Even California's farmers have innovated far better than many other parts of the country, and grows massive amounts of food without needing the subsidies that so much of the rest of the country depends upon.
But that's not what the commenter was complaining about, I think. My understanding is that his complaint is that Republicans made themselves irrelevant and destroyed their chances to provide a counterweight to Democratic efforts. They did commit a spectacular and awful suicide, through things like Prop 187. (However I disagree with the commenter on the Republican Party being able to provide a positive counterweight to Democratic legislation. IMHO their sort of rentier-promoting, winner takes all, style of legislation would kill off the in bio drive industries that drive California's amazing economic engine.)
The part that seems so strange to me is the idea that "it's the republican's fault for not stopping democrat policies".
Like, no part of that was, hey, maybe these policies are bad and we should blame the people who are making the bad policy.
No.
It's the Republican's fault for not stopping it.
That indicates a very skewed world view, and yes, I think requires some introspection.
Sure, blame Republicans for specific bad policy that you disagree with, but it's completely beyond the pale to blame them for the Democrat's bad policy making.
That's like a mom blaming a father for not stopping her from giving the kids too much candy.
Bring a member of a any political party requires you to hew to certain ideological perspectives and ways of discussing issues. I'm not suggesting that the current or former Republican Party had the right answers, but you need more than one perspective to make meaningful change - and if the permitted band of expression is too narrow, you'll never get the better answers.
> Bring a member of a any political party requires you to hew to certain ideological perspective
No, it mostly doesn't, except in fairly strong party systems (which the US doesn't have), and even then it usually only applies to being a member of the party-in-government, not the party-in-the-electorate.
You cannot be a Dem or a Repub pol and survive a primary reliably without hewing to certain ideological precepts - there are notable exceptions, Cuellar of Texas and Collins (to a lesser extent) for example - Even with them, hewing too far outside of the ideological precepts your voters have will find you losing a primary.
The real root of most issues with our system is the primary, This could be remedied by either getting rid of primaries entirely - or introducing fusion voting, either solution would solve the drive to ideological purity during the primary cycle.
> The real root of most issues with our system is the primary,
No, it is the single-winner FPTP general, particularly for seats in legislative bodies. This has been studied fairly extensively in comparative government, the narrow range of choices is the product of a system that effectively avoids proportionality by favoring a narrow range of outcomes. “Primaries” aren't the problem, and most solutions that try to avoid them or reform them while retaining the real source of the problem would either have no effect or actually further reduce meaningful choice.
Low turnout for primaries produces non majoritarian choices, while I'm interested in proportional representation systems but who picks the candidates?
Also, realistically we vote too often, and on too many things - the last time I voted, I had no less than 26 offices to vote for, I'm a reasonably well informed voter, and I had no idea who 3/4's of those people are and in some cases, what their office did.
I'm if the opinion we don't need more choice, when so few people show up to do the choosing.
I remember the conservatives of that era, and as you note, that era died with Prop 187.
The republicans killed their ability to have a place at the table on meaningful discussions about the states future, and as of right now? Being a democrat requires you to hew to certain ideological perspectives and ways of discussing issues. I'm not suggesting that the current or former Republican Party had the right answers, but you need more than one perspective to make meaningful change.
Prop 13 ensures that once you’ve bought in you feel no more pain from the housing crisis, and thus most Californian voters would have to vote against their own individual self-interest to do anything positive on housing, which just won’t happen. By contrast, in Texas there is no income tax but high property tax, and as prices have shot up recently most homeowners have reason to be worried about it and to vote to take action to increase supply to meet demand. It’ll be interesting to see if that actually happens, now that the theory is being put to the test.
I stand to benefit from Prop 13; yet I would vote against Prop 13 without a second thought. It is causing enormous and unjust human suffering. People vote against their self interest all the time, if you convince them that it is for the greater good.
Would voting against Prop 13 result in you having to sell your home/condo? I've wondered this myself and if I'm perfectly honest... I'm not so sure.
Voting against my self interest when all it does is affect my bank balance? No problem. But if it forces my kid to change neighborhoods (and therefore schools) while giving up a home I plan to retire in... that's harder.
It's hard to imagine a situation where property values rise would kick me out of my home, were Prop 13 repealed. If the home is going up massive in value, a 1-2% tax on the value of the home is dwarfed by the increase in property value. Refi or whatever to take care of it. The tax portion of a mortgage isn't that big anyway.
And if property values are rising so quickly that I even notice an increase in the property tax, then every single renter is completely screwed by comparison.
The only way that property value increases could cause somebody to lose their house is if they are completely financially incompetent, as far as I can see.
When housing drops 10% in a year, my property tax bill, like most people who bought a few years go, goes up 2%.
Yes, my property tax bill also goes up 2% when property value jump 10%. But, the cost of govt services didn't jump 10% that year, so why should property tax go up that much?
Not really; yes, it reduces total volatitlity in property tax revenues asymmetrically, since tax assessments fall without restriction in downturns irrespective of turnover, but rise with a sharp limit in upturns outside of a limited set of qualifying events.
But stabilizing property tax revenues, even to the extent it is true, is made less relevant by the way Prop 13 cuts property taxes so low that it shifts the burden to other, more volatile, revenue streams. (While the assessment increase is what most people focus on with Prop 13, it also capped nominal property tax rates in California at a low rate.)
> Not really; yes, it reduces total volatitlity in property tax revenues asymmetrically, since tax assessments fall without restriction in downturns irrespective of turnover
The only tax assessments that fall during downturns are the folks who are underwater, that is, the recent purchases. The folks who aren't underwater get a 2% increase.
That's why, as I wrote, when there's a 20% downturn, most people still have a 2% increase, which keeps tax revenues from falling significantly. In other words, stable.
I write "most" because one of the key arguments of the "prop-13 is bad" folks are that most properties are paying too little tax because of when they were bought.
You can't have it both ways. If you make that argument, the arithmetic shows that prop 13 stabilizes property tax revenues during a downturn.
I'm not following. Postponing those taxes doesn't mean they don't need to get paid. I quickly googled it and saw "The deferment of property taxes is secured by a lien against the property which must eventually be repaid."
Which sounds like a recipe for... grandpa dies, grandma can't pay property taxes so defers it for 10 years. Grandma dies and whoever inherits the home needs to be pay a massive deferment (unaffordable?) or give up the home.
Not sure where this bizarre idea came about that people whose houses dramatically increase in value should:1) be able to avoid paying taxes on that value and 2) pass the house down, in whole, to their heirs without paying increased taxes.
The idea doesn't sound that bizarre to me. I'm not an expert or anything but as people grow older their earning potential slows down too. What if the neighborhood grows in value even though the retired homeowner hasn't made any changes to their home?
It sounds reasonable to me that a retiree with a conservative investment portfolio that is barely over/under inflation should be able to live out their remaining life in that home.
This is a bad situation if you want long-term neighborhood and cultural cohesion, though, because it encourages turnover (particularly among less affluent groups).
There's value to generational continuity, though--again, particularly for marginalized communities. One of the ways gentrification makes its way in is during these kinds of estate liquidations. I think it's reasonable to assert that there's value in not fracturing those communities any more than is necessary.
> Marginalized communities that have seen home values skyrocket?
Illiquid property value isn't the same thing as having money, so...yes?
I mean, if you want every neighborhood in every urban area to be tech and finance bros, maybe this is a good idea, but most people would disagree with the premise you're pushing.
It absolutely is illiquid if you do not want to destroy the composition of an area. It cannot be converted without doing damage to the community in which it exists.
When the market is tech and finance bros, all neighborhoods and all stock will become tech and finance bro'd. That's a bad thing for that community and--uh--society at large.
Yes, that's the point of postponing the taxes. The retiree can live out their remaining life in the home, and the taxes are due when their heirs inherit it.
Yea I guess that makes sense. Although inheritance is a change of ownership and the new owner would see the home re-assessed, no?
The other issue I see is that the deferment program is limited to very low income seniors (< $35k year or something like that). That's pretty low for a lot of places in the Bay Area which means not being able to go on road trips and do whatever it is seniors do in their twilight years.
Proposition 58 allowed homeowners to transfer their principal residence to children without a property tax re-assessment, as well as the first $1 million (not indexed to inflation) in assessed value of other real property."
Of course if the homeowner has more than one child it could get messy
because property tax is based on the value of the property, and your property is worth more too?
a different way of phrasing the question: is it fair that your new neighbor pays twice as much as you to support city services, just because they bought their place more recently?
But note that when your wealth goes up because others have driven up the price of TSLA shares you are not taxed on that wealth gain. You are only taxed on the money you get when you sell the shares. If the price of TSLA shares goes to 2x and then later back to 1x before you sell the shares, and then you sell them, you have no gain and no tax.
It is generally considered to not be a good idea in tax theory to tax things that don't involve either money or things that are very easily converted to money, unless perhaps the tax is relatively small. For purposes of this discussion "money" means whatever the government will accept as a tax payment.
That's partly because you ideally want taxes that are meant just to raise revenue (as opposed to for example so-called "sin" taxes) to not cause much change in the activity or thing being taxed.
All of the extremely wealthy people I know are in favor of maaaive death taxes, of pretty much all wealth. However, none of these people inherited their money, and came from humble backgrounds, so my anecdata may not represent many of the wealthy.
Not to accuse them of being dishonest, but it also costs them nothing to say that, loudly and often, in a political environment where they know it's not going to happen.
These are private and personal discussions, ranging over many areas of politics where we disagree and agree. I have no reason to doubt them. Even with a massive tax eliminating inheritance, their children will lead charmed lives. They are more afraid of a dysfunctional family than their children suffering from material wants.
I agree, but want to note: Landlords only vote once. Short of being extremely patronizing and presuming that the residents of SF are easy to bamboozle when they are paying very high prices to live there, it has to be recognized that there is a broad appeal to those who live there, including those who rent, to not change the housing regulations - because they do not want the growth. It would seem the housing shortage is a feature not a bug for the majority of residents. That might be selfish (and I certainly don't promote it here), but I do think it has been a societal choice rather than one of a few elites.
Unfortunately the residents of SF have been far too easy to bamboozle by demonizing developers, both real estate (the villain of so many movies) and software (blamed for rising rents and inequality in SF despite the long-standing inequality for financial services, etc.).
One of SF's big problems is the prevalence of culture war, vibes, and being hipper than thou overriding the economic interests of residents with less wealth.
My observation was that the people buying into that demonization don't do it because they are dumb, but because it serves their purposes.
I agree with your last sentence, but this works because that last group is a minority (even if barely), so the larger society votes against them. it only takes a small amount of poorer people who don't want growth for nostalgic / quality of city life reasons, and you have a pretty sizable majority coalition against change.
The culture war issues largely forces some weird alignments, its a weird mashup of left social issues, an even weirder mix of left wing and right wing economics and "progressive" requirements that everyone hew to proper "optics". (My gripe with the progressives is that saying the right thing often appears to be more important than doing the right thing.)
In the end, its simply a recipe for never fixing any of the actual problems, with the added benefit of giving your base and activists plenty of ideological wars that can never be won.
Yup, like the Sangiacomo family, a bunch of slumlords who own more real estate in SF than anyone else, and have done nothing of note to earn that position other than hoovering up real estate and sitting on it while rents skyrocketed: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Angelo-Sangiacomo-one...
However, SF and California is largely run by a small handful of families who are "kingmakers." The Buells, Fishers, Guggenhimes, Gettys, Marcuses, Pritzkers, Swigs, and Trainas.
For the amount of hate the providers of wealth got during the boom time, it’s only fitting that SF finally sees a downturn. It was quite literally asked for in many ways by many people.
> "My biggest fear is the city either has to slash spending on, say, police, or it aggressively puts up taxes on businesses to cover the shortfall and drives them out of the city," he said.
It's always "we'll have to slash spending on basic city functions!" or "we'll have to raise your taxes!" but never "we'll have to cut all these unsustainable social policies!"
SF spends literally hundreds of millions on the 7,000-8,000 homeless. If they need to cut programs, that should be the first. It's not only excessive spending, but it's totally unaccountable. They could just buy the homeless RVs in Bakersfield for less than they spend to leave a bunch of junkies on the street and still have overdoses that exceed COVID deaths.
Corrupt DPW that accomplishes fuck-all, for one. Subsidizing car ownership and driving in general. Rent control is arguably unsustainable as well. Don’t forget paying people to be homeless and shoot up in the BART station. Allowing people to get on BART without paying.
Anyone else who has lived in the area could probably think of half a dozen more.
"Allowing people to get on BART without paying" is probably San Francisco's least important problem, as compliance with BART fares is > 99% among BART riders, which puts it above the federal income tax (~85%) and far ahead of parking meters (< 50%). If you want to use armed police to end some policy of perceived subsidization then the people you want to taser are parking scofflaws.
Also FYI BART is not a city agency and it has its own police force.
To say that it’s the least important problem ignores a pretty wide swath of ostensibly less significant problems (cigarette misuse near buildings, litter, speeding, unlicensed drivers, unlicensed panhandlers, take your pick). I’m going to need a citation on that claim.
BART collected half a billion dollars in fares in 2019 so again, it has way higher compliance with the user fee scheme than other competing services like street parking and bridge tolls and vehicle license fees.
I really hope L Breed and her leadership approve more residential conversions of office spaces in downtown. A few developers are interested but there seems to be a holdup for whatever reason. SF has already had some successful conversions like 100 Van Ness.
While I don't think that is a surefire way of fixing dtsf but it is a start. The superdense neighborhood of chinatown and somewhat dense neighborhood of little italy are pretty lively still, probably because everyone lives above the commercial and retail spaces that exist there.
(There's not much commercial offices in those neighborhoods but there's a few, especially between california and bush)
1000 sq ft (92 sq m) is a quite decent family apartment. For young singles or couples without kids, half of that is pretty decent. 20-25-30k new homes is nothing to sniff at, even if it won't solve the full problem.
This is what happened in the NYC financial district post 9/11.
Companies didn't want to move back into some of the office buildings so they were converted into residential housing.
I remember dating someone who lived down there and looking up at the ceiling and mentioning "Why do you have such weird drop ceilings here?" This is where I found out her apartment used to be an office building.
2 reasons 100 Van Ness was easier: compact floor plate (ensures access to light) and didn't need a seismic retrofit as it was built in 1974. That's not the case for a lot of office buildings. Also mentioned: nearly all buildings are partially leased right now - it's impossible to do the work with anyone still in there.
Why would people want to live in relative expensive housing if there are no jobs in the city for them?
Converted apartments are not going to be "affordable" (by say the likes of students, and people just out of college not in finance or tech.
Once the white collar workers leave, there is less demand for service workers to live there. Sure maybe some salaried workers like in emergency services and policing might choose to live there. If I were a service worker, living in SF proper would not be the thing I'm looking to do.
With more housing, the relative expense decreases, and some people will move in just because they like the bustle of living in a city. Those are also the kind of people who will patronize local establishments.
Years ago, the center of the action in "Silicon Valley" was actually in the geographical valley, in the south bay. The south bay is way different from SF - safe and sterile. Some people would move up to SF and commute all the way down to the south bay just because they wanted to live somewhere interesting. Those sort of people also tended to be the sort to start startups, and the center of the action gradually moved to SF.
I think SF can try following the same path a second time, focus on catering to the gritty hipster demographic and hope something valuable grows out of it. Added housing to push rents lower seems like a good start.
I think it's more that the barriers to entry for tech businesses have plummeted. In the olden days (80's, 90's, etc), you didn't have the internet as your force multiplier.
Housing remains expensive only if too many people want to live there. If the demand goes down, housing costs must eventually go down as well.
Once the balance between supply and demand is similar, urban living should be cheaper than suburban living, because urban areas need less infrastructure for each resident.
We could reduce the cost with increased supply. Conversions are cheaper than new buildings by a large margin. Plenty of people would appreciate living in a metropolitan area for its own sake.
People appreciate places they can live that affords them earning a living (work). Yes, you may get an influx of people wanting to live in a city, but it's not going to solve the issue for people who can't afford an apartment in the city.
If the work itself is leaving, why would they want to live in a city, just to live in a city? To what end? I guess retirees with deep pockets, ok?
I agree it will come down from $4000. But if I were a service worker, I'd balk at $2500 (let's say it even went as low as that) if I could get it cheaper elsewhere. Hayward, Oakland would be cheaper.
Downtown SF and SJC were quite ugly during downturns before tech came to the rescue. Market street until recently was still suffering from blight brought on 40 years ago.
I don't understand what your contention is here, but my best understanding is that you think that there's nobody who could afford these apartments with jobs in SF, and that they would sit empty. Is that correct?
If I got that correct, then I would first say that there are massive numbers of people who want to live in SF who have been kept out by the $4000 prices, and lowering it to $3500 or $3000 would bring in far more people.
Further, thinking only in terms of service workers and tech workers misses a lot of what goes on in the city, there's a ton of people in between.
But even if I'm wrong, then having a huge number of vacant apartments is really good news for all renters in the city. It puts pressure on all other landlords to power prices. It changes the market segmentation, and drives improvements in prices or apartment quality for all market segments adjacent to whatever price the conversions initially target. There is no downside to a bunch of vacant office space converting to vacant apartments.
One problem with mass conversions, and in general the way that SF has done planning—zero change allowed for decades then dumping a bunch of new stuff in a small area—is that it takes a long time for the new neighborhood to gain all the character of a neighborhood, for example the little shops, the community groups, etc.
It's absolutely insane that the government has any say in what a building gets used for. I can see some arguments why the government has a say in constructing a building in the first place, but controlling what it's used for is just planned economy, communist hubris!
It effectively has no zoning which means you get oil processing plants built next door to elementary schools.
The Austrian Economists will jump in here and say that's why certain private property developments buy the equivalent of "sky rights" (or "land rights" I guess) with adjoining properties to effectively create their own zoning.
This is an incorrect urban myth. Oil plants don’t just get built wherever, and there are a lot of common sense provisions in Houston like limits on what can be built close to schools, even though the city doesn’t have zoning.
It’s flat and ugly there, but surprisingly socially vibrant, open, and interesting in large part because barriers to entry are so low and life is so affordable.
Seconded. I've been here for two years and I'm moving out because it's hot, humid, ugly, and car culture is brutal. However, it's a place where it's easy to get your feet under you and live a good life with interesting things. However, I can't recommend the suburbs - especially Clear Lake. They're the worst, most inescapably bland places I've ever seen.
LA has zoning yet still places health destroying oil wells right next to housing and schools and retail.
Houston may not have zoning but it has plenty of code that mandate car dependency and huge amounts of driving and therefore suburban blandness.
Regulation versus deregulation is a barren framing, the real problem is absolutely terrible urban planning rules in the US that have created our bad situations. As a field, it would probably be better if it never existed.
Zoning, in general, is a compromise to a set of mutually-exclusive philosophies: individualism (e.g., private property ownership) and collectivism. Society can't function with only one or the other; there needs to be some mediation. Local governments are theoretically responsible to represent the wills of their voters, so this is probably the best way to do that. We can always argue, however, about where specifically particular zoning rules fall on that spectrum.
That's an extreme view. Of course you want some zoning restrictions. Unless you're saying you're ok with (whatever loudest industry with lots of lorry traffic you can think of) being created nextdoors to you. Full anarchy is bad, super restrictive planning is bad too.
Here in Long Beach we have honest to God oil derricks right in the middle of neighborhoods yet our zoning when it comes to new housing is as strict as it gets.
Won't happen, since the area is too desirable and building a high of farm there isn't economically viable unless you are just gonna do it make your point which would be an extremely rare event we shouldn't optimize for.
Let's have some fun with this. So maybe I am near a hospital, or an elementary school, whatever. I have a nice plot of land. You think people will be okay with me storing nuclear waste for a fee on that land?
Maybe I am next to your house. I want to have a hog farm or a 24/7 very loud factory.
We have environmental protection laws and safety regulations that will prevent you from supporting nuclear waste without massive precautions. Now, I'll concede that there is value in separating polluting industries from business and residential areas. In general, I think a system like Japan has that's much coarser and centrally administered to prevent kicking away the latter by wealthy home owners would be friendly desirable. The US zoning system is so fundamentally broken and full of overreach that no zoning would be a massive improvement.
Ironically the most conservative areas are the ones who fall the hardest for the communist hubris, which is why you can’t get a beer without driving in so much of the USA.
> Some commercial real estate firms say that as interest in opening businesses downtown has dropped, it has risen in other areas of the city.
> “We had our best year in 2021,” said Santino DeRose, managing broker at Maven real estate. “The neighborhoods by far, where people lived and worked, came back the fastest.”
This actually might be a good thing. If the city gets optimized for people who want to live there verses people who are forced by their job to work in the city, in the long term it will be better for everyone and relieve some of the upward pressure on housing.
Why is nobody living there? To me as a european, it looks just like a usual party of a city. Small, individual shops on the floor with offices or homes above. But apparently there are only offices, how? Zoning?
No wonder it's struggling with remote work, there's no incentive to go there. If somebody would be living there, then there would always be someone around to shop, drink or go to work.
> “I’m surprised by how slowly the mayor is bringing back the public workforce,” Moretti said. Requiring a full return would set an example for the private sector, increase BART ridership, “and it would be a shot in the arm for the small businesses that have been struggling for two years.”
AKA offloading the costs onto individuals by forcing them to show up to work the old way. The city needs to pivot to focusing on its full time residents and less of the business sector.
The issue with everybody saying "just add housing" is that SF is becoming unappealing as a place to live for other reasons too. Rampant crime and homeless are big issues. Nobody wants to move to a city with the level of crime that SF now has, when that city is also seriously talking about defunding the police.
I live in Oakland, so have awareness but obviously not direct exposure to SF's current D.A. problems - it seems like SF voted in a person they thought would be a DA that would reduce excessive prison, juvenile->adult conversion, better diversion to mental health support, etc.
It turned out what they actually got was a DA that literally did not do his job, and just had literally everyone arrested put back on the street. Apparently also trying to get his father out of criminal charges as well?
That goes a long way to explain the overwhelming recall in last? weeks election.
San Francisco is self-destructing and sabotaging its own success. Instead of fixing crime and quality of life issues, they've actively made them worse or gas-lighted residents and done nothing at all. I've always thought it was insane paying the prices of SF to live in squalor and near so much crime. BART is also a completely miserable experience. I don't think anyone wants to commute into SF or live there if they don't absolutely have to. Maybe during the next recession, employers will have more leverage to require more in-office work, but I definitely think employees/talent who can work remote are going to when possible. I know I am and that I never plan to commute back to SF or another South Bay campus ever again. I'll take a pay cut to keep working remotely if I have to.
If SF wanted to clean things up, they'd have cops walking a beat in the Tenderloin--something I never say in the 12 years I lived there. I think the lack of any political competition has led to politicians who don't give a shit about what's best for residents and can just coast off the vote blue no matter who mentality.
Beat cops should be a requirement in every neighborhood in every city. It makes the police more human and forces the police to see the populace as more human. I assume it's not done because of a combination of cultural reasons (cops don't want to walk) and budgetary reasons (it's more expensive somehow).
The real solution to take the edge of these sort of impacts is some kind of regional 'Bay Area' or 'NorCal' planning and funding, somewhere between the state and the cities. America is a little unique in the developed world for lacking decision bodies at this level as well as having very local ('city' based) taxation decisions [n.b. I generally think this is good].
Depends on where you are in the country. Some states, particularly ones with executive-style county governments, have started making these stronger forms of government, and in others the spread of the transit network is functionally tying municipalities together more strongly in a similar way.
California has a statewide mandate to reduce commuter miles driven over the coming decades (it's an already outdated CO2 measure).
They've been at it for a while now, and the main result has been intentionally crippling the road system at great expense (without fixing public transit). So, I'm not convinced allowing a regional authority more power to sabotage transportation networks is a good idea.
There are also mandates to add affordable housing, but those are either ignored or lead to boondoggles. (Construction is ridiculously overpriced in California. They may as well be mandating affordable dollar bills.)
One way to fix it would be to streamline permitting, etc for new housing (they did this for ADUs, but that's explicitly limited to housing that's inappropriate for families).
Typical permitting delays in south bay are something like 3 years for new construction (enjoy those double mortgage payments!), and nonsensical requirements add at least 50% to construction costs on top of that.
This could be solved in a few months by Sacramento outlawing such practices, then closing and replacing any non-compliant planning departments.
I think this is a blessing. Cities have been designed for commuters instead of the people living in them since white flight in the 20th century. Just look at all of the metrics in the article. It's all about commuters and the city's dependence on them. Now, macroeconomic factors are forcing cities across the country to actually serve the people living in them. And it's great. Yeah there will be growing pains and this decade could get ugly, but the cities that come out of it healthy might be great places to live.
Uhhh have you stepped into SF since 2010? It is an unmitigated disaster. No one wants to live there. Just had a friend that sold his condo and moved to San Diego.
850,000 living there against their will, I presume? What is it about the city that makes people froth at the mouth? The ridiculous characterizations I read don't match what I see day-to-day at all
If the poll routinely says 40% will leave and only 6.7% do when a pandemic makes the benefits of being here moot for 2 years, you should throw the poll out the window. What's more, labor force data shows most of those have returned. What is your agenda? Why do you people care so much? I'm well aware of the city's problems but there's no nuance in these discussions and it's tiring.
I'm happy we'll have a new DA and hopefully the city will also make folks get mental health help when needed and get serious about building housing (i.e. get out of the way).
There's no _actual_ mental health help in this system. We just have prisons and quasi-prisons that drug their inmates and bill their insurance. Short of that, the healthiest thing we can do for people is to connect them with support, only move them from situations they want to be removed from, and otherwise let them continue to live their current lives.
The hands-off approach is how we've gotten where we are though. We can't expect people to make sound decisions about their own treatment during a psychotic break. What good is this liberty they're afforded if that means they don't get better and are a risk to themselves or others (wandering into the street to get hit by cars, etc)?
Do you even live here? Walk around the Marina, Pac Heights, Presidio, Noe Valley, etc etc and tell me with a straight face that it's an "unmitigated disaster". If you can afford to live here (i.e. you can afford to avoid 'downtown') then you would realize that it's one of the nicest cities in the world.
Yes it sucks right now, because it was built for commuters and there aren't any. It may continue to suck for awhile, but the outcome of this bad period could be a place that's actually nice.
Hard disagree. It is fucked up because we've allowed too many woke policies and gone soft on crime. It is simple as that. There is absolutely zero causation between "Built for commuters" and the absolute hell hole you've seen that is SF.
I feel like this stance does a tremendous amount of disservice in identifying issues and making SF better. It is always scapegoated and never confronted head on. Scapegoats come in the form of: We're kind out here in SF, we are pro-homeless, homelessness is caused by inbound people from other states, etc. None of which are remotely true, but peddled repeatedly ad-nauseum.
> There is absolutely zero causation between "Built for commuters" and the absolute hell hole you've seen that is SF.
Except, the correlation is real and well known.
> At least 550,476 people commute to jobs in San Francisco and San Mateo counties.
When I lived in the city, I would often work downtown. When I would stay late, you would see up close and personal how the downtown area became a ghost town as the majority of people left the city for home. That’s both a brain, talent, and tax drain on the city, and represents a lost constituency that has no connection to local issues.
This crazy idea that "woke" politics are somehow responsible for the rise in crime and the deterioration of living conditions is a talking point invented by Fox News. There is literally zero evidence for it. Boudin failed because the police admitted they refused to work with him. End of story.
San Francisco city planners made an idiotic decision about 50 years ago to push housing out of downtown, replace it with office buildings, and build gigantic freeways to bring people in from their new suburban homes. Now the chickens are coming home to roost. Many, many people fought hard against this stupid decision at the time, and city planners should have listened. Hopefully, somebody learns a lesson here, and we don’t have to repeat this same cycle another 50 years from now.
It was a crazy valuation-driven fashionable thing to have high tech offices in a city center. The whole Bay Area went from being a reasonably efficient place for high tech businesses to an irrational "that's how we do things" consequence of funders wanting everything within a stone's throw of Sand Hill Road. Urban revival is good but it was taken waaay too far and made unaffordable. "Affordable" isn't going to come back without a crisis.
Events are not going to work. I like the idea of converting office space to mixed use / residential. Kill two birds with one stone. Even tho there’s not much to do downtown per se, as neighborhood living prices keep increasing, downtown will eventually look like attractive given its central location.
The market is telling you everything you needed to know.
People aren't in San Francisco because they don't want to be in San Francisco.
Even the people that "loved San Francisco" didn't even like things in the actual city limits, talk to nearly anybody about what they like there and they'll pick an endless list of things from the Pacific Ocean to the border of Nevada. Other cities aren't like that. Red Flag 1 through 10.
There are people that like things in the city limits, 30 years ago. You'll know because they'll tell you about how a nice neighborhood used to be the most hellish thing you could ever imagine and would never visit, but at least artists used to lived there. Which is what they fawn over. As if someone else was going to pay for this $100 haircut, but if I see any gentrifiers I'll bark at them for you! scouts honor.
And finally you begin to notice that almost all the other people that think they like(d) that city don't have an objective view of other metropolises to compare it with. Oh, I get it, this is "The City" for that region that people aspire for, because its 600 miles of frontier from there to Portland, Oregon. A couple aspirational people from Central Valley, "escaping" (their words), a bunch of economic migrants from across the US, visa holders that have no choice in the matter. Okay. Interesting. There were very few people from other cities that really just liked all the nature, and again, fewer of those are talking about the nature within the city limits. All that masked by actual geographic scarcity exacerbated by artificial scarcity to make the high prices seem like there was something to covet? Yeah, everyone that could leave has left.
> The transit system’s looming deficit has given rise to whispers of a new regional tax to fill the gap.
death spiral.
Obviously this is just my experience, I bet many will have seen something similar. I don't think the city government policies are as big of a factor as people think. People saw an option to leave due to the nature of their work, and did.
>Even the people that "loved San Francisco" didn't even like things in the actual city limits, talk to nearly anybody about what they like there and they'll pick an endless list of things from the Pacific Ocean to the border of Nevada. Other cities aren't like that. Red Flag 1 through 10.
This isn't consistent with my experience at all. When I lived in SF, having moved to work for Salesforce, I spent a ton of time at street fairs, nightclubs, museums, concerts, parks, etc, and that's before I get to the food. Most of my friends seemed to be doing the same.
I mean, I have nothing against Lake Tahoe -- it's great -- but you could get that by living in Albuquerque, and the snow to jerry ratio is a lot better.
This doesn't make any sense at all when you look at the prices of real estate. People want to be there, but they are not allowed due to pricing reducing demand.
> The transit system’s looming deficit has given rise to whispers of a new regional tax to fill the gap.
This is a reference to the rental prices. I can see how I didn't make that clear. SF fell the hardest out of metropolitan areas and has grown the slowest.
SF is in a death spiral entirely of it's own making. And unfortunately none of the mechanisms needed to fix it are in place. High taxes and pervasive violent crime outweigh any remaining benefit the city has to offer for those that fled to Austin, Miami, and Nashville.
The city planners made housing unaffordable by design. They chose office space over housing. They made it so that getting lunch downtown costs at least $20. Now they'll choke on used needles and urine. Good riddance.
It's strange that crime is simultaneously all the media ever talks about while also being elephant the media ignores. San Francisco is constantly lambasted mad max where the walgreens owner is being shaken down by the local crime syndicate but it's somehow an open secret that you only read about in top secret government files.
The answer is easy. Crime is down and so not oft reported in articles like this. VC funded articles and social movements are loudly screaming about it. VC / billionaire fanboys are happy to pick up the slack in the comment section.
Media isn't monolithic. Local media tends to ignore or downplay crime--I think in part because the writers are either insulated from it or have their own political biases. National media plays up the crime because they like to use SF as a whipping horse to say "see don't be like SF or your city will have full blown anarchy". SF is actually a huge anchor on national progressives because republicans can always point to SF and show how poorly policies have played out. If SF was as clean/safe as Copenhagen, it'd be a lot harder to make that argument. SF progressives are a different breed altogether though--it's all about scolding people and identity politics to distract from meaningful policies like universal healthcare, elder/child-care, etc.
It's both. Some media spends every minute talking about it and some will completely ignore the topic even when its central to the topic being discussed. Also with social media, most people are seeing this themselves and bypassing commercial news.
I started to think that, but actually the last section of the article, is about crime. I think it’s quite weak however, crime is in my humble opinion the very central reason for the decline of downtown San Francisco.
Downtown as a healthy fully occupied business district is dead. Cause of death: remote work. You can wait 50 years if you want and see if it comes back, but it never will; there’s no going back.
You can’t harangue workers into reversing that, and you can’t browbeat business owners into paying for space that goes unused.
If you assume a lack of business renters being able to occupy the space or live off the people coming do business there, there’s only one customer base left: residential.
“But it’s hard to retrofit”, “we’ll have to redo the laws”, etc. Well, ok. You can wait to see if things will change, but they won’t. Eventually the property owners, and a city in need of tax revenue, are going to have to come to terms with the new reality.
When they do, even if it’s three decades from now, there will be more housing in that area. It will keep the streets filled, it will keep crime down, and it will bring in tax revenue… eventually. It’s anybody’s guess how long that will take, however.