San Francisco is completely, utterly corrupt when it comes to housing. In 2011 there were a total of 418 new housing units built [1]. Really? One of the hottest areas with the highest demand in the entire country and only 418 new units were added in a full year? That's an absolute outrage.
This is why I'm hoping that Bloomberg's efforts to create a Silicon Alley are a success. Maybe SF will realize that it needs to appreciate the tech industry more when people start leaving for NYC. It would be great for tech to be based in a city where (a) it's not the biggest industry (so you don't get mental inbreeding), (b) there's proper public transportation that doesn't require hazmat cleanup because of people shitting and pissing all over it[0], (c) you don't have homeless people and drug addicts everywhere on the streets, and (d) you don't have rampant NIMBYism blocking the development of more efficient housing because they're afraid of "Manhattanization" destroying their "Bay view".
Oh yes, lets look to Bloomberg to show us how to run a city. Shitty rent controls, banning all sorts of things, cops stopping people in the streets for security checks. Brilliant.
Stop and frisk is a huge boon for making cities safer. Every major city does it.
Can you to cite a source for both of those claims? AFAIK, NYC is the only city that does stop and frisk, and it has been proven to be a program to 1) be heavily skewed towards frisking minorities, and 2) resulting in a 1.9% "success rate" in finding a weapon after having frisked the entire African American population once over in NYC (source: http://occupydesign.org/uncategorized/stop-frisk-infographic... )
It's also unconstitutional, but as long as you aren't the one being frisked, it's no problem, right?
5.4% of stops between 2004 and 2009 resulted in arrests. That's actually a really high number, contrary to the characterization of the article. That's tens of thousands of instances of actual wrongdoing being caught.
Stop and frisk does skew towards stopping minorities. That is not in and of itself necessarily problematic. Race, socioeconomic status, and crime are deeply correlated in the big cities. The unfortunate fact is that most crime in New York, Chicago, and LA are committed by blacks and hispanics, and in fact usually both the victims and the perpetrators are minorities. See: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/06/nypd-report-details....
Stop and frisk is not unconstitutional. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_v._Ohio. Playing armchair Supreme Court Justice when it comes to the 4th amendment is fraught with peril, for the simple reason that the founders explicitly left it open to judicial interpretation by using the wiggle word "unreasonable."
Frisks are enabled by Terry for the exclusive purpose of detecting weapons that would endanger officers, and are confined to explorations of the outer layers of clothing (ie, to places where weapons can easily be both detected and accessed suddenly by an assailant).
But NYC is accused of going far past the Terry authorization; the NYPD has been sued for demanding that people turn out their pockets, and for arresting people for drug possession.
If you read the general orders for a large police department (I've read Chicago's, but not NYC's), they're clear on this point: you can't reach into someone's pockets without having either consent or an arrest.
Consider that "Stop & Frisk" may be marketed as a systematic application of Terry v Ohio, but might instead be emblematic of something broader.
(It's also worth remembering that NYPD statistics are controversial; look up "CompStat". I read some Chicago police blogs and get the sense that NYPD's statistic accountability is basically loathed outside of NYC --- which doesn't make the Chicago police right!)
Fairly low weapon-finding rates are about what I would expect, whether the program was working or not. Crime is disproportionately committed by a small fraction of the population. (Victimhood is also highly skewed, in case you were wondering.)
Has stop and frisk helped Oakland? The city is ranked 4th most dangerous in the US.
Maybe tighter gun control makes cities safer? It's supposed to be rare for a SF resident to successfully obtain a concealed carry permit, and a local ordinance requiring weapons at home to be locked up was upheld just a few days ago. (http://www.ktvu.com/news/news/crime-law/federal-judge-uphold...)
Having a police force larger than many standing armies is a huge boon for making cities safer. Stop and frisk probably doesn't have much to do with it.
I don't know about that. Russia and Singapore have roughly the same number of police (~750) per 100,000 inh. One is way safer than the other. (The US is middling with 233 per 100k.)
Also, as a city, Caracas comes to mind. A city with heavy police presence but intolerable crime statistics.
I think that every SF resident is entitled to their opinion on the topic. Do we know how many residents are for housing growth and how many are against it?
SF residents are entitled to their opinion on the topic, but their opinions must also be balanced against the rights of the landowners to develop their private property as they see fit. The point of zoning regulation is to allow a measure of urban planning to safeguard the health and safety of the city, not to allow existing landowners to freeze the city in its current state by restricting development on land they don't own.
It's funny given the economic argument, how we don't often hear about plans to start building in Pacific Heights, where many VCs and business leaders reside, given that it's a neighborhood with probably one of the lowest population densities in the city.
In case you haven't noticed sf is bounded by the Pacific Ocean. It can't just grow and it already has a very high housing density. The only area that can absorb new housing is china basin (3rd st) and that is being developed. The rest is already full.
Do we really want or feel that more people in sf is a good thing? Why not live down the peninsula or the east bay where there's an unlimited amount of space.
There is extremely high demand and artificially limited supply. Without corruption land and buildings would be purchased at fair market value and additional housing units would be built up in their place. As it stands the few real estate owners can continuously increase prices without further investment because corrupt politics prevents any new competition.
San Francisco has a love affair with beat-up 100 year old victorian houses and outrageously high prices. If I owned one of those houses I also wouldn't want to let any new real estate developers into my Cool Kids Club.
Excuse me, how is that a problem again? The same could be said of any exclusive area in the US. If you find San Francisco extremely expensive, then move elsewhere. Seriously.
It's certainly possible to grow SF up like NYC or HK. Both are bounded by water and yet manage to make more living quarters.
As for whether building up and having more people is a good thing that really depends on the people, the culture and the management of the city. Personally Tokyo an awesome place to live with all kinds of activity, culture, etc and it has a population density much higher than SF so it's certainly true that an SF that grows up could be a great place.
okyo an awesome place to live with all kinds of activity, culture, etc and it has a population density much higher than SF so it's certainly true that an SF that grows up could be a great place.
But Tokyo's average building height is lower than San Francisco's already. Tokyo did not grow "up."
Tokyo has double the density of SF by having much, much less parking and much narrower streets. Eighty-five percent of street miles -- or kilometers -- in Tokyo are single lane streets, not single lane each way or single with a parking lane but true single lane. Tokyo also has no truck with SF's absurd excess of easy, cheap, and free parking.
Building up harms quality of life. If you want more density, and you do, then you need to eliminate parking and turn it into housing.
> But Tokyo's average building height is lower than San Francisco's already. Tokyo did not grow "up."
This is very interesting. I did not actually know this. However, the city will never go for this. They make a ton of money through parking fees, citations etc to turn this city into a car free zone. Also, although SF has a large number of exceptions, most Americans have a love affair with cars.
Manhattan also has significantly less potential for destructive earthquakes than San Francisco, making it much easier to build tall buildings. It's not just a matter of being bordered by water. A big part of it has to do with no one wanting to rent or build a 20+ story building in San Francisco. That tends to limit population density.
Tokyo has far more earthquakes and far more tall buildings than SF. Besides SF has plenty of tall buildings even now. Is there something special about the existing tall buildings that would be different from new tall buildings? I guess I'm not quite following your point.
As far as I know none of the existing tall buildings are having trouble finding people to rent them
yes, there is sand and silt under parts of SF. new york is built on granite. the geologies are different. in sf you have to dig 15 stories for a basement. so its not just the seismic issues, but other factors of geology and geography: eg. you have the topo issues (hills). Then you have the SF summer/winds. Lastly, you have an existing stock of Victorian (actually, edwardian in most places) architecture that is worth keeping, for cultural reasons (/arguably).
Check out this interactive map of liquefaction risk. If you zoom into SF you can see that most of the skyscrapers are built in a high risk zone. Guess they figured it was ok.
Great link! But If you zoom in, you'll see the Marina, South of Market, and the edges in NB etc are "red" (the worst areas). This is exactly why the financial district (where the high-rises are) is located where it is (on Yellow to montgomery), and why SOMA was the "wrong side of the tracks". While they are/have been recently building high rises in the Red (embarcadero, etc), they have been digging 150 feet down (ie, 2x the normal height of an above-grouhnd building ~traditionally < 7 stories). to set the foundations. At least that's my understanding.
A ton of lower manhattan is built on fill so that doesn't seem to be a huge problem in building tall buildings. (Battery Park is totally fill, the Financial District is about half the size if you look at how big it was originally, so the rest is fill, etc)
The problem is fill in an earthquake, has risk of ~liquification. So its the combination of factors. NYC would have a major problem with a major tectonic event, for example. ~Nothing there is seismically zoned/engineered.
The problem isn't that you can't build 20+ story buildings in an earthquake zone or that people wouldn't want to live in them (see Japan, Taiwan, etc), but rather that nobody in San Francisco can get permits to build them.
> In case you haven't noticed sf is bounded by the Pacific Ocean. It can't just grow and it already has a very high housing density. The only area that can absorb new housing is china basin (3rd st) and that is being developed. The rest is already full.
No, it doesn't. I live in the Haight (which is a key cultural mecca of the city). While, there certainly are gorgeous Victorian era houses (The Painted Ladies), most of the buildings are look like cute, unstable, four - five floor buildings which were probably built in the fifties or the sixties (Or certainly look like it). IMO, this place could do with a few shiny high rises. I am convinced that it should be possible to design a place that doesn't offend the aesthetic sensibilities of a neighborhood whilst helping organic growth.
> Do we really want or feel that more people in sf is a good thing? Why not live down the peninsula or the east bay where there's an unlimited amount of space.
This is not going to solve the problem. I used to ponder about why Austin which has roughly the same size and population as SF is not as packed or doesn't have as shitty a public transport system. I think there is a reason for that: It is because San Francisco acts like a cultural magnet for the rest of the bay, which means that irrespective of who actually lives/works here in the city, the presence of unlimited amount of space or job opportunities in the rest of the bay is not going to depress demand. I know people living in South/East bay, who keep looking for places. All these requests are driving up our rents and that hasn't been affected by the space constraints outside the city.
Even as early as the turn of the 20th century, there was private development on every single acre that was privately owned in Manhattan. It still grew and continued to be developed. You don't have to worry...if people stop liking cities, they will move to the peninsula or the east bay.
[1] http://www.socketsite.com/archives/2012/05/san_franciscos_to...