… what, is this topic just a free-for-all of random far-right law-and-order grievances now 
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If you’re in a bad relationship and can’t leave it probably means you’re codependent with the City.
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Nobody wants to live there now. It’s full of whiny, libertarian, techbros who couldn’t find their Galt Gulch with gps and a Sherpa to guide them.
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“Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”
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And the portions are so small!
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Yes, which is an advantage they hold over S.F., and Chicago doesn’t have nearly the same challenges with geology that S.F. does. The Peninsula includes a lot of notoriously steep terrain, as well as whole neighborhoods built upon sand dunes that were once considered to be unbuildable. The well-publicized challenges that the Millennium Tower has been facing show that you can’t build residential high-rises there on the cheap, and everything needs to meet the country’s most stringent earthquakes codes.
Addressing housing affordability primarily through rapid construction in a city that’s already one of the densest in the country is not going to yield the results you’re looking for. I’m not aware of any already super-dense American city that solved housing costs primarily by getting even more dense.
It’s pretty telling that in the link you provided above the author gives Houston as a counter-example of a city where apartments are affordable, and not a denser city like New York. At 3160 people per square mile Houston has only a small fraction of the density of S.F., and has much easier land to build on. Not to mention endless suburbs radiating out in all directions, which provides housing options that a packed peninsula doesn’t have, thereby lowering demand.
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In a very deliberate way. What this and his record shows is that he’s a serial abuser, which isn’t just someone who “loses his temper” .
Per homeless person. That’s another “tell”.
“Anger” is an excuse. “Hate” goes to motive. This guy, was violently expressing his anger against vulnerable people he hates or resents. In that he has a lot in common with other right-wingers.
And suddenly their “deep concerns” about government spending vanish. They’re always willing to make an exception to their demands for small government when it comes to guard labour.
“Some San Franciscans might think he was a hero for trying to clean up the city”? Sorry, that’s not what’s going to save him. The defense attorney will try to bring it up obliquely when he tries a temporary insanity plea, but that’s not going to fly.
The joke was in response to your attempt to paint this as a guy who just got angry and lost his self control.
By the way, here’s another thing that could make a San Franciscan lose control!
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Conversations about housing NIMBY in SF always turn in a couple directions:
- our buildings were created by God, the ineffable
- macroeconomics don’t apply here
- there is no NIMBY in San Francisco only our Unique Situation
Meanwhile you have 80 blocks bordering urban park entirely populated with one story plywood and cinderblock buildings with 50% of the square footage used for car storage. Like, that’s a policy choice. You could make… like, any other choice.
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I know @gracchus replied, but I’m going to echo. What this guy did isn’t “losing control.” And please please please don’t write off domestic violence as “losing control,” which implies a kind of unusual tipping over prompted by the external stimuli. An accident. A one-off.
That shit is deliberate. Domestic violence is deliberate. It doesn’t get to skate away with the excuse of “I lost control. Ooopsies.” Fuck that.
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50% used for car storage is definitely not accurate. I’m quite familiar with that neighborhood, and less than 50% of the lower level is used as a garage. As is evident in your photo.
The area of the Outer Sunset district that you’re showing was mostly built up in the 1950s, and there’s a reason that it wasn’t built up earlier, despite the fact that land in S.F. has been in high demand since the gold rush days: that’s all on top of sand dunes. Take it from an engineer who is married to a geophysicist: making tall structures built on top of sand in an earthquake zone is asking for problems. Liquefaction has taken out many a building in the Bay Area.
Is it possible to safely build a bit higher than that on sand with modern techniques? Probably, but it certainly wouldn’t be cheap.
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Honestly… It’s genuinely interesting that there is a reason.
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In fact it was literally easier and more convenient for developers to push landfill into the bay and build on that (Embarcadero in the 19th Century, Mission Bay after the 1906 earthquake) than it was to build on the “Outside Lands” that later became the Sunset district.
The main reason San Francisco was able to set aside so much land to build Golden Gate Park is because that land was all but useless for anything else. Even stabilizing the soil enough to plant trees there was a huge logistical challenge.
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Those gold-rush times led to some interesting solutions. I like how there were a lot of buildings built out of converted ships that took the '49ers to the city:
But I guess we’re drifting off-topic.
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Good on you for amplifying the message; no one should be downplaying or normalizing domestic violence or the people who are abusers, full stop.
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It shows he’s a violent hate criminal?
So far we know he hates
- his family
- homeless people
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It is policy choice and other people have talked about the soil conditions that don’t make that area great for larger structures, but I would also challenge the idea that it is low density in any meaningful sense. The area is, depending on the exact block somewhere between 10 and 50 thousand people per square mile, lower to the south and east, higher close to the park and beach. The high end of that density would make that neighborhood one of the highest density cities in the country, if taken on its own, up there with Hoboken and West New York or for international comparisons Seoul or Athens. The low end of that density would be down in the Philadelphia, Miami and Trenton range or for international comparison somewhere between Liverpool and Frankfurt. Sure, you could get higher, but doing so would require massive infrastructure and coordination between land owners, or massive eminent domain. The link below features a map of both densities and soil liquefaction risk. No one is ignoring macroeconomics, just realizing that the problem goes beyond what is covered in week one of an intro course, once you have more details.
(edit oops forgot the link San Francisco Bay Soil Liquefaction Hazard and Population Analysis | Rocks Rock )
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Same. I lived in that neighborhood for over a decade; almost all the houses are butted right up against each other, interior space is modest by single-family-home standards, backyards are relatively small and most people don’t have front yards at all. It’s only “low density” if your basis for comparison is a Manhattan-style high rise, which would be an engineering nightmare there for reasons already discussed. That lack of private living space in S.F. is a key reason the city invested in a world-class urban park to serve as “San Francisco’s backyard.”
More to the point, “violence against the homeless is an inevitable consequence of bad zoning decisions” is some straight up bullshit anyway.
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As I like to remind tourists in Chinatown…
“Do you know why there is no sand in ‘North Beach’?”
“Why?”
“They used all that sand as landfill for the Embarcadero. Then they brought in other soil to fill out that portion.”
Probably not true in the strictest sense.
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