Google hires private ferry service

Seriously. I knew someone that was paying 500/month for a huge studio in a pre-war walkup at 24th and Valencia…
Original steam heat, bay windows, etc…
I have a feeling it might go for more, now.

doesn’t work. landlords have figured out the way to kick people out of rent controlled apts is to move into them for a couple of weeks. if the owner is moving into the apt they can boot you from a rent controlled apt. can’t tell you how many people I know in SF that got booted from their apts this way. building owners would move from apt to apt slowly renovating every apt in a building killing the rent controlled status of the building. there are of course exceptions… but increasingly less and less.

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Indeed. A trip on the Southwold-Walberswick ferry is possibly the least luxurious journey I have ever paid for.

Lots of people in North/South Tyneside commute on the Shields Ferry, that’s pretty basic too.

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ferries: good for cities. private ones: bad for cities. these ferries are a symptom of a problem, not the problem.

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I tried it, but it filled the screen!

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Haha! I was going to share the Gosport Ferry with you, but it IS a yacht in comparison to that :stuck_out_tongue:

Lets hope the Google ferry demonstrates the feasibility of public ferry service from The City to South Bay locations. Back to the 19th century, when trains sucked and the roads were poor, but the ferries provided fast, cheap and (mostly) safe transportation all around the bay! http://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Ferries_on_the_Bay

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The solution to that is to move over to Alameda and get a job in downtown SF. The best commute of my life was the year I lived on the island and worked right by AT&T park. There’s nothing like starting your day with a ferry ride.

As for people complaining about how expensive San Francisco has gotten and acting like its something new that just happened in the last 16 years. Nope. I grew up in one of those nice large flats in the Richmond district in San Francisco. My mother, a single mom of 2, was able to afford that place on just her own income in the 70’s and 80’s. As prices rose, she had to move. By the time I was a young adult, that same apartment cost 3x more per month than I earned. By the time I was working in tech in the early 90’s, the same apartment was going for $5000 a month, and I calmly decided to accept I’d never live in the neighborhood where I grew up again.

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You can get something done about that bouncing knee, son.

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I wouldn’t say pathetic, I’m pretty impressed that he dredged this much up using only two words.

Though I do want to see him try to beat this high water mark using just one word.

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I’m kind of surprised they don’t have their own ferries up here in Seattle too. Or maybe they do? They have their own buses, anyway. I think Microsoft does as well.

I’d like to know how the idea that “cities changing” is inevitable is used to excuse the idea that “a few people will get very very rich, resulting in an inequitable city where only the wealthy get to live” as also inevitable. While the former, “change,” is vague and inevitable, the latter is a choice a society makes when ordering its economy.

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Because capitalism, capitalism, freedom, Ayn Rand, capitalism, freedom, capitalism, the only real freedom is economic, capitalism, freedom, etc. I mean, what are you, some kind of commie, actually wanting to talk about how the economy we live in gets ordered.

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Unfortunately, anything South of Redwood City isn’t feasible. San Francisco Bay gets pretty shallow as it goes South; there’s a reason Google isn’t running ferries to Mountain View.

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They mostly got shit for the buses because they were using public bus stops without paying any fees to do so. If they are paying the harbor fees for the ferry then that doesn’t seem to be an issue.

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Am I the only one that finds the wording of the quoted article strange? “Just as tech companies like Google are doing, Google is now doing this”.

Something like 99% of the houses in the Richmod district are utter death traps in the event of an earthquake. A simple loosening of the zoning code for the area would send developers swarming in and replacing those houses with earthquare resilient apartment houses, doubling the population of the district, improving San Francisco’s tax base, and helping reduce the market rents.

But that’s too sensible to allow to happen.

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Are they “utter death traps in an earthquake?” I know my building shakes when the laundry machine runs, but it survived 1906 and 1989!

The only downside to rent control anyone has ever been able to convince me of is that it results in buildings falling into disrepair because tenants are too afraid of being evicted to ask landlords to fix things, and landlords want tenants to move so they can jack up rent to market value.

Everyone knows the solution to the housing-supply problem is building more housing, but the path to doing so in the way you suggest would involve crazy amounts of central planning, eminent domain, displacing long-time tenants who may never be able to return, etc etc. Starting from scratch is a political non-starter, as it probably should be.

Those 2 story rowhouses have the first floor designed to hold a garage. That garage means no diagonal bracing on one side, which means in an earthquake they will each let the 1st floor be crushed by the 2nd.

No it wouldn’t. Lots of developers are perfectly happy to build one building at a time. If you let them, they will buy and replace one house at a time. No need for eminent domain. All you have to do is allow it.

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Heck there’s plenty of empty lots in SF. Plenty of industrial properties that could be bought and converted. Except that building anything in SF is a sysiphean task.