San Francisco to shut doors over rising rent

[Read the post]

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They’re installing the spindizzies as we speak! The flying bridge will be in Coit Tower.

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…That was from the Onion.

I haven’t met anyone who read “Cities in Flight” in decades! What do you suppose the trade of SF as a migrant worker city will be? I would think the galaxy is already saturated with social media & silly apps.

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High tech weaponry. They have thriving electronics and “defense” industries already. Of course they will need the germanium to earn the germanium, eh?

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Hahaha. Love this.

We have a blogger here in LA who keeps trying to spin up an “affordability crisis” - seems that census data indicates that almost all LA renters spend a larger share of their incomes on rent than some academics and bureaucrats think they should.

Big news! Young people don’t always follow the well-meaning advice of tenured economics professors and government housing bureaucrats.

But according to her, “no one can afford to live here.”

Which probably explains the ongoing population increase and congestion issues.

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The Golgafrincham B-Ark has got the market niche pretty much sewn up for anything SFO could possibly do.

I hear Detroit has a sweet deal up on AirBnB. Whole city, 5 bucks. Check it out, SanFran.

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San Francisco’s NIMBYism is pretty impressive.

Some people simply find new construction to be butt ugly cheap ikea-ish modern (and frankly it is). Of course, the reason why it is butt ugly is because you need to bribe half the city in order to get approval to build and after they take their bribes they’re not going to turn around and say, “it would be nice if you put a facade on it that matched the neighborhood.”

Some people don’t like their neighborhoods being rapidly gentrified since all of a sudden it becomes unaffordable for them to live there. Of course, this happens partially because we approve so few new units that demand drives prices to the roof. If we had instead approved say, 200,000 units and saturated the market, the speed of gentrification would have dramatically been reduced since you can’t charge $1.5 million for a 1300 sqft place when there are thousands of other units on the market as well.

The thing is, SF is tiny and really, people only want to live in the Eastern half (where it is less foggy). Unless we start tearing down Victorians (and the population would rightly revolt against that), there isn’t enough space to meet demand.

It frankly makes more sense for people to move to Oakland and lobby to dramatically improve BART.

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Some Life.

It’s funny because it’s almost true.

As opposed to what?

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Hasn’t everybody read about Okie cities?

/me raised hand. Bought in Oakland in 2006 (on moving to California), live a mile from the BART.

No, the reason it’s butt ugly is because developers are soulless philistines who don’t give a flying fuck about aesthetics and aren’t about to spend a dollar more on architects, engineering, or materials than they need to. Since they’re already getting top dollar for glass Lego eyesores, they have no motive to build anything better.

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or even

I like the second building. Can we build it in Oakland?

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Yes, but we could force them to build pretty facades if we weren’t taking bribes just for them to build anything at all. Actually, that could be our bribe.

We could force them to build pretty slightly less hideous facades by enforcing existing zoning regulations instead of rubberstamping every exemption request.

Add another one to your list. I remember reading it when I was school age. And was reminded of it again when we took a wrong turn and ended up in Scranton, Pennsylvania during a US holiday. It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment that it might be a real place. :slight_smile:

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BoingBoing would be the place to find us. I would guess that they churn out artisanal widgets for people who still practice the lost art of blogging.