As the article notes, housing costs is probably the primary driver. For San Francisco specifically though, since the late 2000s the city’s leadership hasn’t done much to meaningfully increase...
As the article notes, housing costs is probably the primary driver.
For San Francisco specifically though, since the late 2000s the city’s leadership hasn’t done much to meaningfully increase housing supply or make life better for those already living there. The vast majority of funding and development has been focused on attracting business and building offices and shops.
This has been coming back around to bite SF in the ass ever since it became clear that the pandemic wasn’t going to be a minor blip. All those offices that they’d been betting on for bringing in cash emptied out as companies either went remote, downsized their office presences, and/or moved their offices to more cost-effective areas. As a result, they’ve now got all this expensive empty office space rotting while housing costs continue to rise.
It would’ve likely been better to focus on trying to meet demand for housing and bringing housing costs down by any means necessary, despite the pleas of wealthy NIMBY landowners (which more recently, the state would’ve backed them up on with Newsom’s efforts to fix the housing problem). People aren’t anywhere near as fickle as businesses and will generally stay so long as they can reasonably afford to do so.
I'd say it's an unholy confluence of wealthy NIMBY land/homeowners, anti-gentrification activists, and incompetent+corrupt city government and bureaucracy. The New York Times recently did a nice...
I'd say it's an unholy confluence of wealthy NIMBY land/homeowners, anti-gentrification activists, and incompetent+corrupt city government and bureaucracy.
Rafael Mandelman, a San Francisco supervisor who represents Noe Valley, said he has been trying to chip away at the city’s web of regulations that make projects so costly and time consuming. He is crafting a charter amendment to slim the city’s government structure, which includes 56 commissions and 74 oversight bodies.
There is a YIMBY movement and I took their recommendations into account for voting back when I still lived there, but it doesn’t seem to have gotten a lot of traction. I wonder how much voter...
There is a YIMBY movement and I took their recommendations into account for voting back when I still lived there, but it doesn’t seem to have gotten a lot of traction. I wonder how much voter disenfranchisement factors in — most of those who’d vote YIMBY are young working class and many may not have much time or energy to spare for politics.
Too many young professionals in tech who are scared of the unhoused or who otherwise have strongly conservative social values (at least for the area) and people who retire here for YIMBYism to be...
Too many young professionals in tech who are scared of the unhoused or who otherwise have strongly conservative social values (at least for the area) and people who retire here for YIMBYism to be effective.
That may be the case, but I never got that sense from talking with coworkers there that any were opposed to YIMBY-aligned policies. In fact they seemed almost unanimously in favor of building...
That may be the case, but I never got that sense from talking with coworkers there that any were opposed to YIMBY-aligned policies. In fact they seemed almost unanimously in favor of building housing and getting people housed.
I’ve only worked for small-midsize startups where comp generally isn’t FAANG-tier and it wasn’t uncommon for people to be living in/around the tenderloin or the mission to have a mentionable amount of paycheck left over after rent though, so it’s entirely possible my slice of the tech world isn’t representative of the whole.
How many lived in SF as opposed to commuted? Voted regularly? There are plenty of YIMBY, but my experience is they mostly don't live in SF. There's also large sections of SF with entrenched land...
That may be the case, but I never got that sense from talking with coworkers there that any were opposed to YIMBY-aligned policies. In fact they seemed almost unanimously in favor of building housing and getting people housed.
How many lived in SF as opposed to commuted? Voted regularly?
There are plenty of YIMBY, but my experience is they mostly don't live in SF. There's also large sections of SF with entrenched land owners and the wealthier class. I'm just not sure the numbers exist, but I'd love to be proven wrong.
It seems to me that in SF proper it's pretty entrenched. Highly recommend https://www.sfyimby.org/ but my impression of looking at voting turnouts for pro-housing issues there's still a lot of...
It seems to me that in SF proper it's pretty entrenched. Highly recommend https://www.sfyimby.org/ but my impression of looking at voting turnouts for pro-housing issues there's still a lot of people voting against certain pro-housing initiatives. The easy to digest ones that often do a mix of good and harm (in particular when it comes to initiatives and measures which also target the unhoused often in unhelpful ways) tend to go through alright on general leftist principles, but the stuff with real aspirations seems to hit a lot of voter opposition.
I get it. I am a West coaster that used to be an East coaster, and really want to move back. I moved out here for the ample tech job opportunities about 15 years ago. It used to be so incredible...
I get it. I am a West coaster that used to be an East coaster, and really want to move back. I moved out here for the ample tech job opportunities about 15 years ago. It used to be so incredible out here. I remember being stunned at how safe, beautiful, and clean my city was, despite being a larger city. Bought a house a few years ago just in time before the interest rate hikes, wanted to spread my roots here and settle in forever. Since buying the house, cost of living has doubled or maybe tripled, my property taxes have increased every year as new initiatives continue to pile onto the property taxes and nothing else, and my neighborhood is no longer safe due to police policy not allowing them to pursue. There are used needles being found at the playgrounds where I'm taking my kid, cars stolen and stripped and dumped down the street from me, armed robberies at the grocery store I go to almost every day, and a couple months ago guns were being fired out of stolen cars just outside my house. With having a toddler now, being separated from all the family back East, our family is also lacking a lot of support structure so it's been pretty tough. I really want to leave at this point but the interest rates have gone so crazy that it would end up a bad financial decision to do so.
I hear you - I also have a super low interest rate and feel locked in to my house. That said, it sounds like you're feeling pretty miserable, unsupported, and perhaps unsafe where you live now....
I really want to leave at this point but the interest rates have gone so crazy that it would end up a bad financial decision to do so.
I hear you - I also have a super low interest rate and feel locked in to my house.
That said, it sounds like you're feeling pretty miserable, unsupported, and perhaps unsafe where you live now. Surely getting out of that situation is worth dealing with a higher interest rate? (assuming you can afford it, obviously)
It seems crazy to me to stay if the reason is purely to avoid making a financial choice that's not ideal. Peace of mind and your mental health have value too.
I'm also in a place where I would love to move to a safer place if I could. But the problem I have is not that rates are higher than they were, it's that housing prices skyrocketed in part due to...
Worth noting that rates today (7-8%) are just barely on the high side of normal historically, we've just come out of an extended period of abnormal low rates and that makes it a tougher pill to swallow.
I'm also in a place where I would love to move to a safer place if I could. But the problem I have is not that rates are higher than they were, it's that housing prices skyrocketed in part due to the historically low rates, and they take ages to come down (if they ever do at all) once rates go back up. So now I'm in a position with high prices and high interest, with no real relief in sight.
Yeah, that's a serious issue - I was specifically responding the the parent comment who already owns a home in a very HCOL area (and therefore has equity in their home they could use to buy a...
Yeah, that's a serious issue - I was specifically responding the the parent comment who already owns a home in a very HCOL area (and therefore has equity in their home they could use to buy a likely less expensive home where their family lives) and who's principal roadblock to moving seemed to be an emotional investment in low interest rates.
Your situation is very different and definitely sucks. I'd be in the same place but got very lucky when rates bottomed out
Understood, but I should explain that my situation may not be all that different. I also have a mortgage on my current home (in a HCOL area), but haven't owned it long enough to have any real...
Understood, but I should explain that my situation may not be all that different. I also have a mortgage on my current home (in a HCOL area), but haven't owned it long enough to have any real equity. The poster above mentions buying a few years ago, so may have a little equity but it's hard to say for sure. I can't speak for them, but I'm just pointing out that emotional investment may not paint the whole picture, as there may be a very real financial impossibility at play.
There are a lot of other factors as well. The quality of schools that my son will go to, ease of access to nature, availability of asian grocery supplies (a problem in many rural areas),...
That said, it sounds like you're feeling pretty miserable, unsupported, and perhaps unsafe where you live now. Surely getting out of that situation is worth dealing with a higher interest rate? (assuming you can afford it, obviously)
There are a lot of other factors as well. The quality of schools that my son will go to, ease of access to nature, availability of asian grocery supplies (a problem in many rural areas), availability of jobs in my field. Ultimately, we would still need to live near a reasonably-sized city ideally, so it's unlikely we will be able to "break even" on a home unless we compromise greatly on some of those criteria.
It seems crazy to me to stay if the reason is purely to avoid making a financial choice that's not ideal. Peace of mind and your mental health have value too.
As a father, my number 1 source of stress is the financial security of my family, so it's really hard to commit to something so risky.
The data shows that police pursuits end in a vehicular crash about 20% of the time, the police safely apprehending the fleeing person 40% of the time, and the person successfully evading the...
The data shows that police pursuits end in a vehicular crash about 20% of the time, the police safely apprehending the fleeing person 40% of the time, and the person successfully evading the police roughly 40% of the time. So it's less than even odds that a chase will work, and 1 in 5 that it'll end in a crash.
It's not about enforcing the law, but about the relative effectiveness of certain techniques.
Isn’t that ignoring the externalities that having a blanket policy that criminals won’t be chased entails though? I mean it’s not as if by not chasing a criminal, they’ll somehow decide that...
Isn’t that ignoring the externalities that having a blanket policy that criminals won’t be chased entails though?
I mean it’s not as if by not chasing a criminal, they’ll somehow decide that because the police were so nice, they won’t do crime anymore.
Criminals can be identified and arrested without on-the-spot reckless chases. In a modern city, it's pretty much impossible to drive anywhere without intersection cameras tracking your movements....
Criminals can be identified and arrested without on-the-spot reckless chases. In a modern city, it's pretty much impossible to drive anywhere without intersection cameras tracking your movements. If a crime is serious enough to engage in violence/pursuit, it's serious enough to get a warrant. And it's certainly better for a judge to order an arrest than for police to act on their own prerogative.
The sole purpose of the criminal justice system is protecting public order and minimizing harm to the public, not letting peoples' base fantasies of retribution play out. If something is likely to imminently endanger the public more than leaving it be, it's the wrong course of action.
At the end of the day, these places are less safe today than they were 5 years ago. In-N-Out closed their first store in 70 years because of skyrocketing crime in Oakland. What is being done to...
At the end of the day, these places are less safe today than they were 5 years ago. In-N-Out closed their first store in 70 years because of skyrocketing crime in Oakland. What is being done to fix this?
That's a much bigger question than "Why don't the cops get into car chases?" Frankly, Oakland's police force has been a travesty in good times and bad times, for literal decades. They weren't...
That's a much bigger question than "Why don't the cops get into car chases?"
Frankly, Oakland's police force has been a travesty in good times and bad times, for literal decades. They weren't better in times when crime was lower, but the economy was better, and most boats were rising with that rising tide. Now that things are harder for the poor, they're turning to crime more and more.
If the cops prioritized dealing with crime around the airport, there's any number of ways they could do that, all the way up to extensive cordons and sting operations, given the limited exits from the area. But I couldn't say why they're as incompetent as they are. Long term departmental disfunction?
I live in the southeast, and know lots of people who have moved here from the west over the past 10 years. Hardly anyone has gone in the opposite direction (and those that have seem to be moving...
I live in the southeast, and know lots of people who have moved here from the west over the past 10 years. Hardly anyone has gone in the opposite direction (and those that have seem to be moving to the outskirts of Portland). Even if jobs out there pay more, it's still not worth the difference in the cost of living. It's not just people that are exiting either, it's companies moving their flags out of the state as well. Unfortunately for people who were already here, that's greatly contributed to a much higher cost of living here.
As someone moving from a coastal CA city to more of the midwest, one of the easiest ways to tell is by moving truck rental prices - from where we're moving to where we currently live, a 10' Uhaul...
As someone moving from a coastal CA city to more of the midwest, one of the easiest ways to tell is by moving truck rental prices - from where we're moving to where we currently live, a 10' Uhaul would cost us $1000. From where we live to where we're moving, it's about $4400. I can only assume they are calculating in the cost of a return trip and paying an employee to drive the truck back as well.
Renting a 6'x12' cargo trailer would cost $1500, dropping it off where we're moving. Renting the trailer for 7 days (returning it back to CA) is ~$200. When we moved down, they were begging us to tow an empty trailer along with us for a financial incentive. At the time, it didn't make sense - iirc, they were offering about $100 to tow an empty trailer 1200 miles, between gas and the slower speeds we refused.
As the article notes, housing costs is probably the primary driver.
For San Francisco specifically though, since the late 2000s the city’s leadership hasn’t done much to meaningfully increase housing supply or make life better for those already living there. The vast majority of funding and development has been focused on attracting business and building offices and shops.
This has been coming back around to bite SF in the ass ever since it became clear that the pandemic wasn’t going to be a minor blip. All those offices that they’d been betting on for bringing in cash emptied out as companies either went remote, downsized their office presences, and/or moved their offices to more cost-effective areas. As a result, they’ve now got all this expensive empty office space rotting while housing costs continue to rise.
It would’ve likely been better to focus on trying to meet demand for housing and bringing housing costs down by any means necessary, despite the pleas of wealthy NIMBY landowners (which more recently, the state would’ve backed them up on with Newsom’s efforts to fix the housing problem). People aren’t anywhere near as fickle as businesses and will generally stay so long as they can reasonably afford to do so.
I'd say it's an unholy confluence of wealthy NIMBY land/homeowners, anti-gentrification activists, and incompetent+corrupt city government and bureaucracy.
The New York Times recently did a nice article on how San Francisco is spending $1.7m on a small public one-toilet restroom.
Agreed, those are all major factors. It’s a terrible mess.
SF needs a single-issue YIMBY party. There should be enough renters to out-vote the NIMBY land-owners.
There is a YIMBY movement and I took their recommendations into account for voting back when I still lived there, but it doesn’t seem to have gotten a lot of traction. I wonder how much voter disenfranchisement factors in — most of those who’d vote YIMBY are young working class and many may not have much time or energy to spare for politics.
Too many young professionals in tech who are scared of the unhoused or who otherwise have strongly conservative social values (at least for the area) and people who retire here for YIMBYism to be effective.
That may be the case, but I never got that sense from talking with coworkers there that any were opposed to YIMBY-aligned policies. In fact they seemed almost unanimously in favor of building housing and getting people housed.
I’ve only worked for small-midsize startups where comp generally isn’t FAANG-tier and it wasn’t uncommon for people to be living in/around the tenderloin or the mission to have a mentionable amount of paycheck left over after rent though, so it’s entirely possible my slice of the tech world isn’t representative of the whole.
How many lived in SF as opposed to commuted? Voted regularly?
There are plenty of YIMBY, but my experience is they mostly don't live in SF. There's also large sections of SF with entrenched land owners and the wealthier class. I'm just not sure the numbers exist, but I'd love to be proven wrong.
Hard to say about voting habits, but half or more lived in SF. The ones who didn’t usually had families and had to commute in to be making any money.
It seems to me that in SF proper it's pretty entrenched. Highly recommend https://www.sfyimby.org/ but my impression of looking at voting turnouts for pro-housing issues there's still a lot of people voting against certain pro-housing initiatives. The easy to digest ones that often do a mix of good and harm (in particular when it comes to initiatives and measures which also target the unhoused often in unhelpful ways) tend to go through alright on general leftist principles, but the stuff with real aspirations seems to hit a lot of voter opposition.
I get it. I am a West coaster that used to be an East coaster, and really want to move back. I moved out here for the ample tech job opportunities about 15 years ago. It used to be so incredible out here. I remember being stunned at how safe, beautiful, and clean my city was, despite being a larger city. Bought a house a few years ago just in time before the interest rate hikes, wanted to spread my roots here and settle in forever. Since buying the house, cost of living has doubled or maybe tripled, my property taxes have increased every year as new initiatives continue to pile onto the property taxes and nothing else, and my neighborhood is no longer safe due to police policy not allowing them to pursue. There are used needles being found at the playgrounds where I'm taking my kid, cars stolen and stripped and dumped down the street from me, armed robberies at the grocery store I go to almost every day, and a couple months ago guns were being fired out of stolen cars just outside my house. With having a toddler now, being separated from all the family back East, our family is also lacking a lot of support structure so it's been pretty tough. I really want to leave at this point but the interest rates have gone so crazy that it would end up a bad financial decision to do so.
I hear you - I also have a super low interest rate and feel locked in to my house.
That said, it sounds like you're feeling pretty miserable, unsupported, and perhaps unsafe where you live now. Surely getting out of that situation is worth dealing with a higher interest rate? (assuming you can afford it, obviously)
It seems crazy to me to stay if the reason is purely to avoid making a financial choice that's not ideal. Peace of mind and your mental health have value too.
Worth noting that rates today (7-8%) are just barely on the high side of normal historically, we've just come out of an extended period of abnormal low rates and that makes it a tougher pill to swallow.
I'm also in a place where I would love to move to a safer place if I could. But the problem I have is not that rates are higher than they were, it's that housing prices skyrocketed in part due to the historically low rates, and they take ages to come down (if they ever do at all) once rates go back up. So now I'm in a position with high prices and high interest, with no real relief in sight.
Yeah, that's a serious issue - I was specifically responding the the parent comment who already owns a home in a very HCOL area (and therefore has equity in their home they could use to buy a likely less expensive home where their family lives) and who's principal roadblock to moving seemed to be an emotional investment in low interest rates.
Your situation is very different and definitely sucks. I'd be in the same place but got very lucky when rates bottomed out
Understood, but I should explain that my situation may not be all that different. I also have a mortgage on my current home (in a HCOL area), but haven't owned it long enough to have any real equity. The poster above mentions buying a few years ago, so may have a little equity but it's hard to say for sure. I can't speak for them, but I'm just pointing out that emotional investment may not paint the whole picture, as there may be a very real financial impossibility at play.
There are a lot of other factors as well. The quality of schools that my son will go to, ease of access to nature, availability of asian grocery supplies (a problem in many rural areas), availability of jobs in my field. Ultimately, we would still need to live near a reasonably-sized city ideally, so it's unlikely we will be able to "break even" on a home unless we compromise greatly on some of those criteria.
As a father, my number 1 source of stress is the financial security of my family, so it's really hard to commit to something so risky.
I don't understand why this is a thing. Why even have police if you won't let them enforce the law?
The data shows that police pursuits end in a vehicular crash about 20% of the time, the police safely apprehending the fleeing person 40% of the time, and the person successfully evading the police roughly 40% of the time. So it's less than even odds that a chase will work, and 1 in 5 that it'll end in a crash.
It's not about enforcing the law, but about the relative effectiveness of certain techniques.
Isn’t that ignoring the externalities that having a blanket policy that criminals won’t be chased entails though?
I mean it’s not as if by not chasing a criminal, they’ll somehow decide that because the police were so nice, they won’t do crime anymore.
Criminals can be identified and arrested without on-the-spot reckless chases. In a modern city, it's pretty much impossible to drive anywhere without intersection cameras tracking your movements. If a crime is serious enough to engage in violence/pursuit, it's serious enough to get a warrant. And it's certainly better for a judge to order an arrest than for police to act on their own prerogative.
The sole purpose of the criminal justice system is protecting public order and minimizing harm to the public, not letting peoples' base fantasies of retribution play out. If something is likely to imminently endanger the public more than leaving it be, it's the wrong course of action.
At the end of the day, these places are less safe today than they were 5 years ago. In-N-Out closed their first store in 70 years because of skyrocketing crime in Oakland. What is being done to fix this?
That's a much bigger question than "Why don't the cops get into car chases?"
Frankly, Oakland's police force has been a travesty in good times and bad times, for literal decades. They weren't better in times when crime was lower, but the economy was better, and most boats were rising with that rising tide. Now that things are harder for the poor, they're turning to crime more and more.
If the cops prioritized dealing with crime around the airport, there's any number of ways they could do that, all the way up to extensive cordons and sting operations, given the limited exits from the area. But I couldn't say why they're as incompetent as they are. Long term departmental disfunction?
Mirror, for those hit by the paywall:
https://archive.is/jLJU9
I live in the southeast, and know lots of people who have moved here from the west over the past 10 years. Hardly anyone has gone in the opposite direction (and those that have seem to be moving to the outskirts of Portland). Even if jobs out there pay more, it's still not worth the difference in the cost of living. It's not just people that are exiting either, it's companies moving their flags out of the state as well. Unfortunately for people who were already here, that's greatly contributed to a much higher cost of living here.
As someone moving from a coastal CA city to more of the midwest, one of the easiest ways to tell is by moving truck rental prices - from where we're moving to where we currently live, a 10' Uhaul would cost us $1000. From where we live to where we're moving, it's about $4400. I can only assume they are calculating in the cost of a return trip and paying an employee to drive the truck back as well.
Renting a 6'x12' cargo trailer would cost $1500, dropping it off where we're moving. Renting the trailer for 7 days (returning it back to CA) is ~$200. When we moved down, they were begging us to tow an empty trailer along with us for a financial incentive. At the time, it didn't make sense - iirc, they were offering about $100 to tow an empty trailer 1200 miles, between gas and the slower speeds we refused.