When will be shed of Wall Street? Can someone take these jackasses out of lower Manhattan for us?
Yes, it should be easier. Iād probably support any relaxing of building restrictions/red tape as long as it doesnāt result in unfair displacement of renters or have drastic unintended consequences. City needs to build up. Pretty much every vacant lot or dilapidated and closed gas station in my neighborhood is being cleaned up and developed. I wish the architecture was less cheap and unimaginative, but thatās the economics&design of construction these days, what can you doā¦
OH, I do want to mention that the kind of development needs some scrutiny, because I really hope we donāt build a bunch of crap like Park Merced: ugly, isolated, claustrophobic and no one wants to live there.
Right, the buildings with a whole floor of garage in the bottom can be very bad in quakes. One at a time, okay, I suppose youāre right, but the only way it would be politically possible is to wait for a building to be vacant before bulldozing it. Probably wouldnāt be very easy, let alone ethical to displace people.
Part of the reason for that is that some of the best undeveloped real estate (i.e. the old Naval Shipyard near Hunters point) still has toxic waste that nobody seems eager to clean up.
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Yep, I actually know some people involved. (Tentative yay, I guess?) But various parties playing hot potato with the toxic waste issue is why that area wasnāt developed decades ago.
Right, but the current construction boom is incentivizing some of that. Like I said, the abandoned gas station lots on Valencia and Mission Streets that were empty for years are even being developed. The state or something offers some reimbursement or tax breaks or something to get people to clean it up and develop it but it was never worth it until now I guess.
What are all these businesses that youāre talking about in Illinois?
Funny, I live in Oakland and have for seven years now and what your describing isnāt the norm. There are fights about gentrification but youāre painting a far more actively negative picture than the reality.
In fact, thereās a reasonably extensive public ferry system in place in the Bay Area.
That being said, this is the first time Iāve heard of a private ferry. Like trains, boats are extremely efficient for moving large groups of people around, but Iād imagine much less efficient for transporting just a couple dozen.
Iām curious to know what your ethnicity, so I may mock it.
Or is that racist?
Anyway, I am home. In Southern Illinois, where it may be flyover country in that region sometimes called Mid-South, a part of the country that Boing Boing contributors and commenters regularly mock for being poor and lacking in the class and sophistication theyāre used to when theyāre not too busy pretending to care about poor people. Yep, the weatherās crappy out here, itās true, and thereās not the exciting night life or the exciting culture life, but them things is for them as has, not the poors.
SF has been an expensive place to live for decades now. Decent-paying jobs may be scarce here, but median home price here is $66k while the median home price in SF is $798k. Median household income where I live is only $34k, but median income in SF is $73k. In other words, the ratio of median home price to median household income is somewhere around 2:1āoften considered the idealāthe household price to income ratio in SF is around 10:1. Great way to end up underwater on a loan. Do they have an overabundance of dumbasses there? When we bought this house 10 years ago, we bought it from a lady who was moving to LA. In the neighborhood she was moving to, she told us, our $110k house would, at that time, run about $500k, and property values out there continued to rise after that. Iāve seen pictures of million-dollar Silicon Valley homes that look like dumps compared to here. Iām glad I didnāt follow the advice of some of my peers and drop out, move to SV, get a job at a Dotbomb, and drink my way to riches. (For one thing, the market fell apart shortly after I graduated and they were out of work college dropouts with no discernible skills, so thereās that.)
When your income approaches $73k, and you claim you canāt live anywhere else or youāre one of teh poors, my sympathy trends toward zero. If you live in SF, youāre privileged. Period.
Is it for a couple dozen though?
Iād argue that beschizza is concern driving trollies. Very little about Boing Boing suggests that anyone here gives a crap about poor people. Iām guessing most of them would crap themselves and run fast if we dropped them into East St. Louis or Cairo.
Poor downstaters, you could always secede from Chicago like you often threaten to. Itās always fun to remind you guys of how that would shake out in reality.
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Take that, poors!
EDIT: I have to expand on that. 65% of the state lives in ChicagolandāIām counting Cook, collar counties, anything thatās part of the āurban sprawlā. They also have the lionās share of the stateās wealth. We have asshats down here who, rather than cessation, want to kick the Chicago area out of the state. Brilliant plan: at a time when Illinois is more in debt than any other U.S. state, letās get rid of most of the revenue.
But hey, you guys have a lower tax burden, and youāre about to shift more tax burden onto us via teachersā pensions, and the entire state pays for CTA, so you have that going for you.
āCheckmate, poors!ā
Jesus Christ, how asinine can you be? Have you driven down 101 from San Francisco to San Jose (or the reverse) during rush hour? Itās a disaster.
Hereās an idea, how about we force Google to scuttle the ferry so that its employees have to drive to work everyday! Thatāll show em for trying to unclog our overtaxed roads in an environmentally-friendly manner!
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I canāt name any off the top of my head, but weāve had quite a few bug out here downstate, mostly industrial jobs, so mostly jobs that employ thousands of people at a time. The notion that itās taxes may or may not be a lame copout, just like āwe went out of business because Obamacareā is probably code for āweāre broke because we suck at mathā.
I wouldnāt mind working at Google. Can you get me an interview?
Because this is the internet, I can work from home, right?
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You make this sound almost as if this situation isnāt entirely Googleās fault.
I think thatās an unfairly broad statement.
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