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June 06, 2014
Nov 10, 2021
Matthew Yglesias published a
piece on April 11, 2013: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/11/san_francisco_zoning_needs_more_density_and_tall_buildings.html
"San Francisco Is Great--
They Should Make More of It"
I disagree: Places like San Francisco are
great, so we should build more of them.
If your town isn't as popular as San
Francisco's Mission district, why isn't it?
Another way of phrasing Yglesias' line
is "San Francisco is great, so let's
*change* it!", and my idea is we should
mess with the places that aren't great
and make them greater.
Yglesias wrote:
"The city appears to be engaging in a wide array of
overlapping efforts to subsidize/preserve a mostly fixed
stock of 'affordable' housing via rent control initiatives
and strong tenant's rights at SROs and largely ignoring the
possibility of creating more housing."
"If you look at the city's zoning map you'll see that the
vast majority of San Francisco's land mass is zoned for
fairly rinky-dink structures including places that are along
BART/Muni routes or clearly within walking/biking distance of
the central business district."
"The existing mass transit corridors seem to be deliberately
underutilized ... Why restrict a heavy rail corridor to
eight-story buildings? Well, I can’t think of a good
reason ... "
Well, maybe we could find a journalist that could ask someone about that.
"There's zero possibility for sprawl inside the city of San
Francisco (it's all built out), so you either build up or
you just don't build. And the preference, apparently, is to
not build. That way you preserve the existing physical
plant and handle 'affordability' as a question of
allocating an increasingly scarce resource. I'd say San
Francisco is a nice place-- great quality of life, strong
tech sector, high wages ..."
So let's mess around with it and make it a completely
different place.
"San Franciscans seem taken with the fact that the city, as it
exists, is already the 'second-densest' large city in
America. Which is true. But also a bit misleading."
Lots of things are "misleading" in these discussions--
the idea that there's something magically different
about land labeled "San Francisco" and land that's
nominally "outside" San Francisco is one of the odd things.
First, inside the border:
The east and west sides of town are very
different from each other: the east side of
town is the hot side, the west side is more
residential, and relatively isolated from Someone like Yglesia talks
transit lines, but when people talk about about New York's density
San Francisco's density they average it over in terms of the burroughs,
both east and west. because NYC as a whole would
include Staten Island.
One of the reasons there's so much interest
in Oakland right now is it has better transit
access. It's easier to get to downtown SF from
West Oakland than it is from western SF.
Now consider outside the border:
The San Francisco Bay Area, considered as
a whole is a confluence of different towns
with arbitrary borders, many of them with
names that someone like Yglesias has never
heard of. Many of these places are still,
to this day, chasing some version of the
suburban dream-- most of "Silicon Valley"
is like this. One of the issues with San
Francisco is that many people working in
the Valley are disenchanted with that suburban
dream, and the large companies have responded
by letting them live in San Francisco and busing
them to work in the Valley.
If the point is that low density is
bad, then why wouldn't you complain
about places like Mountain View and Yglesias excuse for
Cupertino, which are far lower density focusing on New York
than San Francisco? and San Francisco has
something do with them
being economic powerhouses--
TOO_DAMN_YGLESIAS
But you know, Silicon
Valley is not without
business activity.
"At dinner the other night, some people were talking
about whether Oakland might evolve into a kind of
Brooklyn to San Francisco's Manhattan. But Brooklyn is
actually twice as dense as San Francisco."
Which in turn is almost as dense as Matt Yglesias.
"For San Francisco to be as dense as Manhattan, it would have
to house 3.2 million people instead of 805,000. Obviously that
would have a transformative effect on Oakland as well in
various regards."
Like water usage.
"It's obviously not 'politically realistic' to imagine San
Francisco rezoning to allow that kind of density. But uniquely
among American cities, I completely believe that 3.2 million
people would want to live in a hypothetical much-more-crowded
version of the city if they were allowed to."
Could be. But then the present residents of the place are
leery of this future. But why would anyone listen to those
damn unrealistic elitist liberal hypocrites?
Now let's talk about a scheme for New York City. Take
a look at any map of Manhattan. What's that big empty
green square doing there? Clearly if you got rid of
Central Park you could put in a tremendous number of
high rises, and help solve Manhattan's problem with high
rents.
The higher the density, the better, right?
You're not going to let some vauge qualitative
arguments about esthetics and quality of life
get in the way of jacking up the housing supply,
are you? What kind of elitist are you?
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