I believe there are 7 golf courses within the city limits of San Francisco.
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Thanks Internet, and thanks Richard Florida, for giving us winning and losing cities. And for making the winning cities ever more crowded and expensive, and making perfectly fine cities into “losers.” Soon enough, they’ll all be losers, except some will be chock full of people and some won’t.
Looking especially at you, Internet. Remember back in the 1990s when you promised us that it wouldn’t matter where we lived, and that we’d be able to work from anywhere? Lying sack of shit.
Instead, we’ve got an exodus into the “winning” cities, and the emptying out of the heartland. Replete with self-segregation and gigantic geographically based political polarization.
Thanks a bunch.
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Yes because all those new residents driving the recent population boom in NYC (a boom relative to capacity and recent levels *not historically) are moving to those sorts of areas. Functionally it doesn’t matter if NYC as a whole is below it’s peak population. As the important part of the equation is there are too few places to put the people who are there now.
The rent does not come down if a Manhattan high rise goes from containing 200 units of housing to 200 units of luxary housing. Even if the total population of Manhattan is lower than it was 30 years ago. And it doesn’t help that the population is suppressed by how much of Manhattans real estate is functionally vacant, as much of that luxury development is investment properties for foreign money, or people who own multiple homes. It’s also not particularly useful to consider individual boroughs in isolation. As a person living in one often works in another, hangs out in a third.
A bit like complaining that San Francisco isn’t suffering the same disparity because only certain neighborhoods are growing faster than others.
Populations are dynamic but so are housing stocks. Right bow NYC and cities like it. With problems similar to it. Have too few housing units for their current resident levels (or at least too few to stabilize rents). And even more people are moving to them to chase jobs.
And even though other places rural or urban are seeing the opposite dynamics as incomes and jobs erode. We’re seeing a massive shift of economic activity and people to very particular places. From suburban and exurban locations. Working class and manufacturing centers. To service and white collar centers in very particular sorts of cities.
I don’t think your wrong I just don’t think that sort of historical population outlook has an effect on housing costs as they practically exist right now.
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Actually I think you were disagreeing with someone else! We both agree with the article that nonluxury units need to be added in mass via zoning reform to have an effect on housing costs, and the luxury construction boom has no effect on it. Luxury tends to bring in new residents or stay empty as a tax shelter. The urban legends of fully sold but empty luxury high rises are rampant.
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Yeah, well, I just got back from chillin’ with my dog at a beach that had both nuns and nudists out enjoying the sun and spectacular views of the Golden Gate Bridge so you can just take that negativity about my city and go hang out in Missoula.
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Yeah. At least Richard Florida, unlike those who run the internet, seems to reckon with the consequences. Although Paul Solman’s ‘pointed question’ gets a total copout response, I thought!
Ah I’m on mobile at work. I think I mentally connected your response to some one else’s.
Like I said might be a nice place. But I’ve never seen so many people use the phrase “don’t you know who I am?” in so short a time span. And I’m from New York. We basically invented that level of displaced entitlement. I think, at least in the bits I was in. You’ve got a whole shit ton of newly arrived people who have no clue what they’re doing. Crammed into a fairly small city. Being douche bags at high level. I couldn’t tell what the hell the city was actually like, just that the people I was running into were awful, and a good lot of the most awful weren’t from there.
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When you go out of your way to disrespect someone else’s city (your words) then you lose the moral high ground for calling them “douche bags.”
I don’t know who you were hanging out with but for what it’s worth I can’t recall hearing anyone here say “Don’t you know who I am?”
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You beat me to it; it had to be the people he was around.
I can think of some folks who are likely to be so pretentious and full of themselves, but they’re the same kind of people who would be self-absorbed jerks no matter where they are; be it NY LA, or Buttfuck, Mississippi.
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Right I just ran into a seemingly bizarre number of those people in a very short span of time and seemingly every bit of SF I wandered through. Which wasn’t a lot of it. Its why said “the current atmosphere”. This was around the same time as all those protest of the Google buses and what have. It was a very weird day and there were obviously a disproportionate number of start-up new comers running around ratcheting up tensions. And I didn’t exactly feel warmly welcomed by the locals either. Which may very well have been warranted given the behavior I was seeing out of others. It didn’t make a good impression.
Maybe it was the bits of the city I floated through. Maybe its calmed down a bit. But I can’t say I liked it.
You might notice that I specifically refereed to people not from there, being douche bags. Quite obviously new arrivals or visitors.
So more that I think San Francisco is legitimately suffering a plague of douche bags. And while the root problems are the same as many other cities are dealing with. There is something fairly unique going on there. In terms of the different groups moving in and out, the sorts of gentrification going on. And the behavior of those doing it. As much as I did not really enjoy witnessing it it did make me a lot more sympathetic to a lot of the anger a lot of the long term residents seem to have. And their fears about the ways their city is changing.
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Thank you, Frisco, for making me feel better about N’York.
San Francisco, may I suggest some enlightening listening?
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Haber–Bosch process
So, you’re saying the opposite is true; you were able to garner an in-depth multifaceted perspective of all the multitudes of neighborhoods and communities in such a densely populated city in whatever amount of time you spent there?
Riiiiiight.
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I think that’s how you kill them…
An aging population is going to have problems with those stairs.
Another reason for zoning relief. Across the street from me in a 50x100 lot that had grandfathered zoning a garage was torn down and a 16 unit, 4 floor building has gone up with an elevator. The predominant zoning of max 2 units, max 35 ft dictates those ugly boxes with stairs. Yes, parking on the block may get harder, but maybe the bodega on the corner will start carrying more fresh fruit and vegetables as the density of customers increases and fewer of them have cars to go to the supermarket every time they need something.
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If you look at the level of Census defined Urbanized Area, the San Francisco-Oakland Urbanized Area has a density of 6,266 people per square mile, while the New York-Newark Urbanized Area has a density of 5,319. This is largely because the San Francisco Bay Area doesn’t have the ultra-low density suburbs that take up so much room around New York.
Saying that the Bay Area can handle 100 million people is silly, and can only support the NIMBYs (“See, they really do want to turn every square inch into Manhattan! No more parks or open spaces.”). But the Bay Area can and should house a lot more people, because people are commuting in from the Central Valley, people are living in overcrowded and substandard/ illegal spaces. Most of the Silicon Valley cities have been happy to add jobs, which support a city’s tax revenue, but not to add housing.
One great program is the Homeward Bound program. For any homeless person not originally from San Francisco, the program buys them a bus ticket back to their home town provided there is a parent, child or loved one to take them in. That is a program as a tax payer I would be overjoyed to help pay for.
