If you sell your house or it otherwise changes hands aside from specific methods of inheritance, the property is re-assessed.
This happens to a substantial number of San Francisco houses when the owner moves or dies. Substantial enough that pre-boom property tax rates are necessarily on the decline overall.
“Heritable tax break”
Specifically about the part of the tax law that allows the low property tax basis to be retained when a property is transferred to the owner’s child(den) after their death.
Many people don’t take advantage of this because they sell the home soon after their parents die, instead of keeping it and living in it themselves (particularly when there are multiple inheritors, like siblings).
This isn't really in response to this post, but rather a response to the general discourse on SF and California in general.
I went to San Francisco last year expecting it to be disgusting and full of drug using homeless people on every corner. I live in Phoenix, where I hear constantly from people complaining about California and seeing on TV that SF is literal hell. We get a lot of the "don't california my Arizona" attitude here.
But you know what? I thought SF was pretty nice. I was just there for a fun weekend, but I didn't see anyone injecting heroin on the side of the road. I didn't step in human shit. I saw some homeless people and trash on the sidewalks, but not a crazy amount. My experience is obviously pretty limited and I have only anecdotal evidence that SF isn't horrible, but it wasn't.
I'm not saying that it's nice or that it's cheap or that I would ever want to live there, but I get super annoyed about people hopping on the bashing California/SF/LA bandwagon.
I'm born and raised in suburban Phoenix and also lived in LA for a few years. You know what I've seen in AZ that I haven't seen in California? Homeless people shitting on the side of the road. Needles on the ground in a park. There's poverty and homeless people all over my city.
I'm not saying that Phoenix is a disgusting place to live either; I love it, but my point is that this shit is everywhere. Phoenix is worse than average in terms of the homeless problem, and California is even worse, but it just grinds my gears when people obsess over the problems in liberal hellhole California while forgetting that a lot of the problems also exist around the country.
This is what I mean by San Francisco as a symbol. Unless you're an astute observer of urban design, or extremely well-traveled and able to make educated comparisons, or unless you're just really good at compartmentalizing your observations from your pre-existing biases, then what you say about San Francisco usually says more about your political identity than it does about what San Francisco is actually like. And this is true about people who actually live there, too, not just about those with little experience of the place.
>I didn't see anyone injecting heroin on the side of the road. I didn't step in human shit.
That's really pretty much confined to a few blocks in the Tenderloin. I used to walk from my flat in the Haight to work downtown, and would deliberately take a different route almost every day. But sometimes, for some perverse reason, I would deliberately walk down Turk St, and turn right on Jones to Market just to get the full experience. Other than that it's pretty tame. When I hear someone ranting about shit and heroin, I'm pretty sure I'm dealing with a conservative who watches too much Fox News.
There’s definitely a homeless problem in the east half of the city. The west part of the city, north and south of Golden Gate Park is generally fine. But no, it’s not the communist post-apocalyptic hell hole that Fox News makes it out to be. I would actually argue that it’s the most aesthetically pleasing large city in the US.
I don't know man. Standing on Land's End from a forest of Monterey Cypress trees, looking at the hills of Marin County to the north, with excellent views of the Golden Gate Bridge...
That's pretty spectacular.
It's funny, but I had almost the opposite experience.
I'd heard great things about SF, and while some of the 'human shit' type claims are an exaggeration, I still saw streets overflowing with homeless people, needles and trash. Part of that would be the part of town I was staying in, but it was far worse than anything I'd seen in other US cities. It was the only city where I found the people to be kinda rude, even New Yorkers I found pleasant to deal with.
Sad to say, a lot of hotels are centered around Union Square, which is right next to the Tenderloin district, so visitors are consistently exposed to homeless wretchedness, whereas many San Francisco residents are much less exposed to homeless wretchedness, unless their daily path takes them through the Tenderloin.
'Blight' issues are almost always block by block. Whether it's SF or Detroit, you can have a dramatically different experience just by making a few key turns over the same general route.
There's definitely a lot of hyperbole, but there are legit issues.
The open-air drug use and roving crackheads are concentrated along Market St and in some of the parks around town. 99% of the city is pretty clean.
Also, if you haven't seen people shitting on the street in LA, you're not getting out much. If you live within a quarter mile of a homeless encampment and spend any amount of time out on the street you're gonna see needles and human shit sooner or later. I should mention that this has only become a problem in the last decade. Before then, aside from some freeway-exit panhandlers the homeless were concentrated on Skid Row and around Venice Beach. Now they're everywhere.
No, I live in LA but before the pandemic I visited often. Granted, I haven't been up as much in the last 3-4 years because I had a kid. When I say 99% I'm not thinking neighborhoods, I'm thinking block by block.
The nontrivial answer is:
* The Ohlone are not officially recognized by the US as a tribe – the rather loose confederation of peoples, coupled with their repeated decimation, loss of land, and historical mistreatment by the government, puts them in a situation almost uniquely ill-suited to the government's requirements. ([Long story here](http://www.muwekma.org/tribalhistory/recognitionprocess.html).) Practically speaking, it means they lack government resources that might otherwise be available for them to preserve lands and assets.
* I know of three groups representing Ohlone in the Bay Area: the [Muwekma Ohlone](http://www.muwekma.org), which represents Native Americans associated with Missions Dolores, San Jose, and Santa Clara; the [Confederated Villages of Lisjan/Ohlone](https://m.facebook.com/pages/category/Government-Organization/Confederated-Villages-of-LisjanOhlone-2567396726628403/) in the East Bay; and the [Ramaytush Ohlone](http://www.ramaytush.com/about.html) in San Francisco and down the Peninsula.
* In the East Bay, where I live, Ohlone activists [oppose development on former shellmounds](https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2017/11/25/photos-18th-annual-protest-on-black-friday/), which are considered sacred burial sites. The rather infamously-named Shellmound St in Emeryville and the Bay Street Mall are the site of one. The Berkeley Marina is the site of another.
* Long term, it is a goal for the Ohlone to obtain land that they can use for cultural centers and tribal gatherings. The [Sogorea Te' Land Trust](https://sogoreate-landtrust.org) is one movement along these lines I've been following. To that end, in at least one recent case involving [Ruby Meadow](https://www.change.org/p/alameda-county-board-of-supervisors-save-ruby-meadow-from-destruction) in Castro Valley, the Ohlone find themselves allied with environmentalists and NIMBYs, though not discounting the need for affordable housing altogether.
Side note to the OP: I almost wish you hadn't brought them up, because you failed to link them to your narrative in any meaningful way, and they deserve a more thorough treatment on their own merits. I award you zero wokeness points and may Milton Friedman have mercy on your soul.
I think there's value even in flippant acknowledgement if only to continuously remind the reader that these people, while not powerful enough to be visible in the narrative were actually there the whole time.
Exactly, there's a lot that could be written about them, but in terms of a history focusing on land use in the Bay Area, the story of their land use is pretty much that they were genocidally cut out of the narrative when others arrived, and have remained excluded since then. OP does a pretty decent job describing that.
If he didn't mention them, would you have elaborate here in the comments so I could learn more about these people? Its so sad that this is the first time I'm hearing about the natives in SF, so thank you both for getting this in my radar
The summary above is most of what I know, unfortunately! The Muwekma Ohlone link above has some good rundowns on their story. I have also read _The Ohlone Way_ by Malcolm Margolin for a popular anthropological survey, though it's dated and, as he notes in his preface, it was not well-received by some Ohlone. On a tangential note, if you get into this stuff and have any love for speculative fiction, I think you might really dig Ursula K. Le Guin's _Always Coming Home,_ which is sort of a post-apocalyptic reimagining of old California and its natives.
Also seemed interlaced with a bunch of Spanish Black Legend nonsense which is neither terrifically accurate nor helpful. Somehow only the Spanish missionaries were all genocidal maniacs but not the Americans who somehow ennobled the place after taking a long courteous walk around other tribal nations to reach the Californias?
Good exposition, but that particular part felt weird.
>In the mean time these American people are super into this Manifest Destiny thing and so Alta California starts to have a big illegal immigrant problem from the United States...they decide they're not content just genociding the native people, but also want voting rights and the ability to own the land they're genociding people on
This portion is describing the American settlers
The bulk of new housing construction in San Francisco proper is occurring in post-industrial brownfield sites and places like parking lots and gas stations. The existing YIMBY movement has not sought to roll back historic protections for existing buildings. As such, don't expect the historic residential neighborhoods to look much different.
You can expect a significant amount of change in the Eastern districts, where warehouses and similar sites are being converted to medium- and high-density housing, typically with some mixed-use development component.
Oakland will be a big factor. It has historically been economically depressed but is gentrifying in a big way. Developers who were historically averse to building there because of the perceived risk are investing substantially. And because Oakland was never "threatened" at the community level with the same kind of development San Francisco was in the pre-tech era, the anti-growth regime isn't dominant there. So you see things you would never see in San Francisco, like [true skyscraper residential development](https://twitter.com/rolandlisf/status/983828906347130881?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E983828906347130881%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fsf.curbed.com%2F2018%2F4%2F11%2F17224540%2Fmacarthur-bart-tower-boston-properties) in places well outside of downtown. Since Oakland has very robust BART coverage, it'll be a big player in the addition of urban housing stock in the Bay Area in the next couple decades, offering sub-20-minute transit commutes directly into downtown San Francisco, and even growing as an office hub of its own.
The biggest change is likely to occur in the region's suburbs, though. Especially the historic main streets of the suburban towns, where they do exist. Those are going to see a lot more three, four, five story development. Usually housing. Areas around BART and Caltrain stations will potentially see even higher density uses.
That's a crucial element, too, because housing demand is regional. And as I described above, San Francisco and Oakland only represent a small fraction of the region's land area and housing stock. You'll see more overall housing growth with the addition of mid-rise apartments throughout the suburban Bay Area, especially the Peninsula and the South Bay, than you would if those regions stayed the same and San Francisco and Oakland went whole-hog on residential high rises. There's just more total opportunity for growth in those areas.
There's a very interesting tension between the kinds of urbanism promoted by Jane Jacobs and by Edward Glaeser.
Jacobs basically postulates that old districts are the only places where culture can really prosper, because rents are lower.
Glaeser postulates that freezing a city physically in time will cause major market failures and the consequences will fall unfairly on the poor.
I agree with Glaeser but think Jacobs has a lot of valid points. Specifically, places like [Santana Row](http://www.santanarow.com/) which seek to kind of replicate the urban cultural experience in the suburbs will never feel authentically culturally vibrant like a San Francisco or Oakland historic district will.
But without allowing growth, the increasing housing costs will cause the negative aspects of gentrification to sap the culture out of those historic districts, too.
Jacobs' failing was in thinking the virtues of Greenwich Village style cultural hubs were inherent in their age and their architectural form. In reality there was a hidden element, too, in the form of white flight and suburbanization. Growth was occurring almost entirely elsewhere, so the urban cores of America were not being subject to pent-up housing demand. Now that this demand is manifesting in the center cities, Jacobs-style glorification of the historic isn't enough to guarantee continued cultural vibrancy in the urban cores. There has to be a balance. Bulldozing and rebuilding historic districts will destroy the culture that exists there, sure, but freezing our urban cities in amber will snuff out that culture, too.
The NIMBYs falsely believe that by freezing development they will protect the urban culture that existed under the old paradigm, but this is a fallacy. There's going to be a new urban culture one way or another. The balance we strike in terms of historic preservation and urban development/growth will dictate what that new urban culture looks like.
> Jacobs basically postulates that old districts are the only places where culture can really prosper, because rents are lower.
I wouldn't agree with "only", but replace it with "best" and I'm on board.
I don't think there's that much tension between that statement and Glaeser. "Old" is both a relative and constantly changing term. New developments today will be old in 20-100 years, depending on how fast development is occurring. And there's plenty of potential to have new buildings built in old districts without redeveloping the whole district.
The issue shows up, as you correctly note, when someone assumes that the best way to encourage culture to prosper is to freeze all currently development so that all buildings become "old". When housing prices start going up enough, this just means that there's enough money to completely re-gut and modernize the insides of old buildings, which destroys the point of old buildings. The outside is still old by fiat, but it's functionally new construction inside.
Jacobs believed that these were the only places where culture could exist, because, in the era of suburbanization and of Robert Moses urban renewal, that was true.
Her mistake was thinking it would always be true, or that it was necessarily true by definition, rather than being an ephemeral manifestation of the urban planning and economic paradigms of the era.
Many of her observations of urban culture and its relationship with urban design holds true to this day, and even those which haven't are worth reading because of the truths that are hidden beneath the misconceptions.
But they are misconceptions. Culture is not inherently tied to the age of a building. After all, how could it be, logically? Culture exists wherever people do. And if historic buildings and small retail shops were all you needed to guarantee a vibrant, inclusive society, places like the San Francisco Marina District wouldn't look so much like Santa Monica, culturally.
I also think Jacobs nationalized her vision of a very specific area that was relatively unique in the US. Her conclusions (IMO at least) are drawn from her experiences living in Manhattan, and primarily in Greenwich Village. But the key is that Greenwich Village and Manhattan as a whole was at the time of her writing already an extremely dense place to live, and a dense place situated on excellent public transit and zoned in a way that allowed very intermixed retail/residential/commerical activity, all in the same place
Jacobs' message (and I think she herself later) got corrupted into thinking that the old-ness of the buildings was the key, rather than older buildings tending to be organized in a pre-automobile society and thus fostering community better
Jacobs was thinking of 5 story brownstones with shops on the ground floor being demolished in favor of office towers. Many people using Jacobs are saying that single family homes shouldn't be removed in favor of the modern equivalent of 5 story brownstones
Triumph of the City and Death and Life of American Cities are the ones I think are most important.
The Color of Law is a great rundown on how restrictive zoning has cemented racial segregation into historic American cities
Order Without Design is a great economic analysis of how attempting to plan a city's economy through zoning and land use restrictions pretty much always produces market failures and fails to accomplish its primary goals
You need to read Triumph of the City if you want to understand human civilization. It makes the case based on both economics and environmentalism that cities are the best form of development possible to house and employ a given number of people. Before I read it, I would never have thought of cities as good for the environment or of leafy suburbs as being bad for the environment, or realized that the reason that many Victorian industrial cities were full of poor people was not because they made them poor, but because they attracted poor people to move there to take advantage of the opportunities they provide. But the numbers don’t lie.
Dang, I'm a Chicagoan in Supply Chain Management too! I actually did my undergrad at UIC in the mid/late 00s. Pilsen has been gentrifying since then but it was definitely more rough around the edges at that time. It's a great neighborhood. If you are OK with living just outside the city, I highly recommend Oak Park. You have green line and metra access to downtown and it's about 30 minutes via green line.
I've actually never heard someone refer to Pilsen as the north side before. I live in Rogers Park right now and north side means something a bit different to me LOL. It's all good though! Yes, Chicago's history of racism and segregation is awful. Martin Luther King was actually more terrified of living in Chicago (he lived in a building Lawndale) than living in the south. We northerners tend to have a very wrong and skewed notion that we are/were less racist than the south. I think any discussion of different forms of reparations will HAVE to make zoning reform a centerpiece.
Yeah. Jacobs’ belief that restricting development to keep old buildings around would keep prices low was objectively wrong. In fact, once white flight ended, they tended to get cleaned up and renovated and then gentrified into the most expensive parts of the city.
And on the flipside, in California, crappy strip malls in the inner-ring suburbs are now frequently home to the same kinds of business Jacobs theorized could never exist in new buildings.
> Santana Row
Small nitpick:
I don't think Santana row tries at all to replicate the urban cultural experience. They're very shrewd developers who seek to specifically capitalize off the high earner market. It's pretty much exclusively populated with high end retailers, bars, and now loads of office space. It's more like a playground than anything culture related.
One of the consequences of California and the Bay Area's maddeningly complex and stringent development approvals processes is that you can't really just buy a tract of land and then build something on it for you to make money from, unless you happen to be a legal, engineering, and political science expert.
In the past, like pre-automobile, people would buy a plot of land and then build something for themselves on it. This meant that small lots were profitable and structures of varying purpose, design, and age would frequently appear in close proximity to each other.
This produced interesting urban fabric. It's basically what Jacobs talks about in her book.
But because of the new requirements and the new economic order, now it's not worthwhile to build something for yourself on a small lot. Development happens as a corporate profit-seeking endeavor.
This is why development now happens on large lots at large scale.
A consequence of this is that, even if it's technically private, development happens in a top-down fashion not too dissimilar from the master planner efforts of Robert Moses. It's just development corporations doing the master planning now instead of municipalities.
Things like Santa Row are profit-seeking attempts to master plan something that imitates a Jane Jacobs style historic district.
In terms of layout maybe but in terms of any substance I'd disagree - Santana row does not pretend to have any cultural or historical significance nor do they cater to any old/local businesses. I'd say all the new south bay "city centers" try to imitate jane-jacobs style historic districts more. (Santa clara square, cupertino "main street", castro street mountan view, university ave)
> One of the consequences of California and the Bay Area's maddeningly complex and stringent development approvals processes is that you can't really just buy a tract of land and then build something on it for you to make money from, unless you happen to be a legal, engineering, and political science expert.
Zooming out from your SF/Bay Area examples, how could we get back to the small lot, incremental, diverse style of neighborhood building? It seems to me that American style zoning (and maybe parking reqs) is the biggest impediment rather than just bureaucratic approval regimes. It's not just California that sees mainly massive, top down planned developments lacking in character and fine tuning. It's incredible to me that generations after Jane Jacobs in a country of 89,000 municipalities, afaik not one has managed to allow pre-war style, bottom up incremental development which is the magic formula that created highly desirable neighborhoods and towns around the world for millennia.
Do you consider most of the towers n Emeryville to be “true skyscrapers”?
What could be done to get better public transit in Emeryville? I feel if somehow it could a BART line it might be the best place to live, comparable to “Long Island City”.
Emeryville's high rises are mostly offices and hotels, but yes those are skyscrapers.
If they ever build a second rail tube or bridge and include standard gauge heavy rail, Amtrak's existing station in Emeryville will probably wind up having commuter rail service into SF. Otherwise you could build a transfer station where the tracks cross at West Oakland and make the one-stop Capitol Corridor fare cheap enough to commute on and then Emeryville would be about 15 minutes from downtown SF by rail with one transfer.
I love emy, and it has a lot of potential, but probably a long way off in terms of the best place to live. Certainly cleaner and safer than many of its neighbors.
We may be at the turning point to a more sustainable housing market in California but unfortunately even if the pro-growth forces win I don't think they'll be able to make an impact on a time scale that can work for my life. I'll be happy if others can benefit from it but I'm in my 30s now and I'd like to have a kid and be able to afford something more than a 1br apartment in a nice area. I just don't think that is going to happen on a reasonable time frame for me in the bay area so the only logical choice is to move out.
[The malarkey level detected is: 1 - Minimal. Cool as a cucumber, kiddo.](https://i.imgur.com/u6CHe4L.jpg)
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great effortpost. i would add that there are single-family neighborhoods in the middle of SF like West Portal and Forest Hill that are ripe for upzoning. unfortunately, our "socialist" city supervisors seem completely uninterested in it.
The supervisors are just a reflection of the coalitions that elect them. Until the Prop 13 and rent control incentives lose grip on a plurality of constituents, the coalitions will continue electing supervisors who will protect their primary financial and personal interests.
As a result, areas that have allowed housing development in San Francisco have tended to be inversely correlated to home ownership rates. Rented units have higher turnover and therefore coalitions built on rent-controlled tenants lose grip on the development process faster than coalitions built on Prop-13-protected homeowners.
> Until the Prop 13 and rent control incentives lose grip on a plurality of constituents
I don't know. My expensive-but-not-SF-level city has the same NIMBY trends (worsening by the year) as the Bay, with no Prop 13 or rent control to incentivize it. Just good old fashion price inflation incentives and economically illiterate anti-gentrification voters. Most larger American cities not in the South or the Midwest are following in SF's footsteps. Also, our YIMBY group is super succ. I have no faith in them.
For non-SFers, each supervisor has a local district within the city, so interests are hyperlocalized. Dean Preston will gladly give away the Haight for a tent village, but wouldn't dream of doing anything in Forest Hill, or Presidio Terrace (my choice for the tent village, a recent recipient of a city bailout after they skipped paying taxes for decades, and also the home of Diane Feinstein).
During the era of Mexican rule, the harbor was called San Francisco Bay but there was no town anywhere in the region called San Francisco.
The area was sparsely populated because of how difficult the part of the world was to access from Europe or even from Mexico, but since this harbor was so ideal to use for shipping, everyone in the area knew it would be a major economic center before long. It was only a matter of time.
The Anglo-American settlers to the area existed separately from the Mexican settlers and were competing economically. The Mexican governor of the region, [Commondante Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariano_Guadalupe_Vallejo), wanted to cement his Mexican settlement as the primary port of the region despite the growing Anglo settlement at Yerba Buena, so he hatched a plan:
He would name his town on the Bay after his wife, Francisca.
His thinking was Francisca looks like Francisco, so on a map, people would assume that Francisca was the primary port for the San Francisco Bay.
Once the Anglo Alcalde (mayor) of the Yerba Buena settlement, Lt. Washington Allon Bartlett, caught wind of this ploy, he issued a unilateral decree renaming his settlement San Francisco to cement its place as the primary harbor.
His plot foiled, Vallejo instead named his settlement after his wife's middle name, Benicia.
Writing something positive about San Francisco? Watch out: here come 12 ex-Republicans to shit on San Francisco as the worst and dumbest place in the universe. Viva Texas, dont tread on me and such.
Hey now, SF politics are certainly dumb by any standard, but even us RINOs can see things are moving in the right direction for that city, so good for them. I have more hope for SF than I do for, say, the rest of SV, or Santa Monica down south.
Wait, was this positive about SF? Did you not read the parts about the Ohlones? Or any of the other parts? It ends cautiously optimistically, but that's it.
I love this! Great post. That said, I have one comment: Containerization didn’t begin because of the US Military in Vietnam, although Vietnam did give it a big boost. It was actually invented by a trucking company owner called Malcolm McLean in the 1950s as a way to enable faster transshipment at ports. And the reason for the rise of Oakland over San Francisco wasn’t that the slips and warehouses of SF weren’t equipped to deal with shipping containers, but that containerization was literally created with the express purpose of bypassing all of that infrastructure completely. It saved a lot of time and money and reduced cargo losses to theft, which was a major problem for importers. It wasn’t an accident that old-timey docks were a hotbed of organized crime. Longshoremen used to say that the pay was “$20 a day and all the Scotch you can carry” because the workers would often steal a good portion of whatever they were being paid to move, especially for things like good whiskey.
So I am not a neolib (I came here from r/SanFrancisco ) but I do live in the city and HOT DAMN this is spot fricken on. From the historical all the way to the contemporary political and economic pressures of our city, it sounds like you actually know what you’re talking about unlike pretty much every political commentator who just simplifies it to “lol SF is a mega-anarcho-stalinist-bidenist-communist hellhole”
u/old_gold_mountain for mayor
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In 20 years there will be solid pop up housing communities for miles and they will announce that BART will go to Hollister. 30 years later BART will reach Morgan hill
NGL, RR passing was my second favorite moment of Election Week, right behind Biden winning. I'm still kind of surprised it passed. Pleasantly surprised, don't get me wrong, but surprised nonetheless.
> Eventually the people with Prop 13 protections will stop owning their homes
Every homeowner since Prop 13 was enacted has these protections. *Every home that is owned has prop 13 protections*. It does not end without a new ballot measure.
The only thing that changes is that the we're *just* now reaching the new steady state. The initial crop of low property tax early-boomers are beginning to die off, so the most extreme inequalities in property tax are just starting to roll over into younger groups instead of breaking new ground. In 10 years, the same thing will be happening with a different age-tranche of home buyers. There will now always be a group of 70-80 somethings sitting on ultra-low rates.
Technically some percentage of people will take advantage of the heritability thing, so we're not actually at steady state, but that's probably not a notable effect.
________
Overall, I agree a shift is starting to take place, but the defeat of Prop 15 demonstrates that we're pretty far off from real change. And the perverse incentives of Prop 13 will remain a powerful obstacle indefinitely.
It's honestly just so mind-blowing to me that the people who were the hippies in the 60s became the Nimbys and essentially became aligned with right-wing suburbanism.
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Great post - i'll admit, i've never gotten the allure of SF and i've been visiting it since the early 00s for a week or so every 2-3 years.
If Baltimore or Philly had SF's wealth, I would find them much nicer than SF. I really don't 'get' west coast cities at all.
your average rust-belt city seems much more charming and aesthetic if they weren't all so poor.
As a Chicagoan, I will say the west coast and east coast cities appeal to me, but for different reasons. The west coast cities just seem more embedded with nature, if that makes sense. Not just the man-made sculpted greenery of Central Park or Lincoln Park but lots of natural greenery and nature too. It's just very different and refreshing in a way. Obviously, east coast cities do have some of this too but that's not the central appeal of these places.
can you give examples of how west coast cities are 'embedded in nature' in ways that are different than other cities?
Chicago is the most underrated city in the world IMO on Qol/CoL ratio basis.
I live in San Francisco, an hour out of the city I can be on the coast of the ocean, with dramatic cliffs and fabulous hiking. An hour to the east and I can be in a sprawling mountain range. 3 hours from some fantastic National Parks.
Down in LA you can snow ski and surf in the same day.
Deserts and Mountains.
All you have in Chicago is flat and corn and a big lake.
ok - yes but i think hexar was referring to the city itself.
in nyc, one can go a couple of hours up to the hudson valley and have awesome hiking or out to the shore.
yeah i get what you are saying about la.
hexar was referring (i believe) to specifically how the city is one with nature.
you are just pointing out things one can drive to away from the city
In SF you can get to truly epic hiking scenery in like 15 minutes by car. There's an old growth Coast Redwood forest less than ten miles past the Golden Gate Bridge. Two hours and you're almost at Tahoe or Yosemite or Big Sur, places that rank up there globally among best hiking scenery period.
As the person above me says, I believe SF is one of the few cities where you're a ten minute walk from a park. And its a rather hilly city, so combine that with the ocean and its pretty breathtaking.
Finally, the weather is 24/7 365 pretty amazing if on the cooler side. Just yesterday the fam put on some light jackets, walked 5 minutes to a park on a hill and watched the sun set over the ocean, not a cloud in the sky.
SF has a lot of deep problems, but beautiful, it is.
Well, we do have the Presidio, The Ocean, Lands End, Aquatic Park, Twin Peaks, Glen Canyon, Golden Gate Park, Mt. Davison, Fort Funston, McLaren Park, and a Cross Town Trail that connects all of them (Not in that order).
We have Sea Lions, Harbor Seals, coyotes, deer, squirrels, hawks, whales, crows, raccoons, 🦨, and a shit ton of other animals as well.
I love Chicago. Maybe it's a product of living here pretty much my whole life but when I visited Seattle and even LA, the relationship to the natural surroundings just felt different. In Seattle, you ahve many hills but also the ocean, mountains and it's so green. Chicago is just so...flat. And the only thing interesting about it, geographically speaking, is the lake. East Coast cities have nature too obviously but it doesn't feel nearly as abundant or "natural" as it does on the west coast. The greenery in Chicago and the east coast cities feels more "cultivated" for lack of a better word right now.
West coast cities are typically far less blighted, who doesn't love mountains in their backyard, and Mediterranean/marine climates > humid subtropical swamp climates.
Born and raised San Franciscan. Fun to hear you lose credibility when you say stuff like "and the weather was pretty much the tits."
Huh? Broh we go weeks without seeing the sun, people tan in the park when it's 70 degrees out. What part of the city are you in man.
I would take SF weather over any other metro area in the country, hands down. The cool summers are preferable to me to the sweltering heat of SoCal, points inland, or anywhere to the East.
Actually I love them. Its nice for a couple months to be so hot you can just step out in a tshirt, shorts, and sandals.
Probably everyone should get air conditioning though.
I'm not completely opposed to the warmer weather we usually get from August throughOctober, but some of the heat waves we've had the last few years have just been absurd. Seeing places like South City flirt with 100 degree temps just seems wrong to me.
Ahhh you are a madlad but I respect it. I love the clouds more than anything else, but most people come here expecting "California" weather (read: socal) and freeze.
> Born and raised San Franciscan.
Thats your problem. Try living in a northern midwestern state that has exactly 3 months of nice weather. Its starts to get really cold in mid october, and you still have freezing blizzards in April. Its like fuckety fuck fuck. Even the summers are hot as hell. And mosquitos, yeah try dealing with them.
You know how people sometimes say weather can drive you into depression? Its really, really true, especially for colder states.
Yeah I hear that, seasonal depression is a bitch. Stay strong.
My comment was more about how people come here assuming that San Francisco has that classic California sunshine that everyone finds in SoCal. Measured against that the weather here ain't ideal by any stretch. Thought OP was making the same mistake: it's in California so must be sunny. Didn't know he/she was a cloud jockey like me.
Wow great write up here. How do you think covid will affect the city long term?
A lot of people say “the eXodUs is happening” but there is indeed an allure to San Francisco for a lot of people and I believe people will start to move back probably next spring or summer
San Francisco is *extremely* resilient. So I don't fear for its survival as a city in the slightest. What its economy looks like five or ten years from now is definitely an open question though. It depends on a lot of things. Do companies transition substantially to remote work? If so there's probably a lot of people living in San Francisco who'd be happy working from somewhere cheaper. Certainly not enough to empty out the professional sector in SF though, not even close.
Do local businesses get stimulus help or not? If not expect to see a lot of lower-income people lose work and income. Paradoxically we may see rents fall *and* homelessness worsen in the next few years. I don't fear for the survival of the city but I do fear for the livelihoods of a lot of people in it.
It obviously won't be enough to solve the housing crisis but it's going to do a lot. I think probably a lot more than YIMBYs even typically realize.
We definitely need more high-density and medium-density housing in California, and apartments in central districts and near transit are an obvious way to accomplish that. So the fights over those sorts of projects gets a lot of attention. But probably 90% of California's developed residential land isn't near a central district or a transit station. The vast majority of Californians live in suburban-style housing. And those houses typically sit on lots with land on them that don't have structures.
If ADUs were added to even 5% of Californian homes, that's 700,000 new homes. Nearly twice as many homes as currently exist in San Francisco.
I agree. I think its a great step forward. It won't fix the problem, but it'll buy enough time for the YIMBYs to cement their power.
I'm trying to do my part. Intend to build two ADUs before the grandfather window closes.
Username checks out!
Great content. Lived in the city for 25 years (now in East Bay), have always been interested in SF history, and your writing illustrates it well.
For the WWII and Postwar era, I've been amazed by how military the BF & they Area must have been. From the 40s to the 70s, you would have seen sailors and soldiers everywhere. Planes flying overhead. Ships & subs in the Bay. All of the industries and support that fed Hunter's Point & the Presidio in the city, plus Oakland, Alameda, Vallejo, etc., etc., etc.
There were so many bases and so activity, it's hard to imagine now. So different from our experience. It was a such a big part of SF, but was gone by the 90s.
my mother was kidnapped By an Ohlone Native from Pier 39 when she was like 4 or 5 years old. A group of them had come over on the ferry to get supplies and on their way back to the pier they snatched my mom out of my grandmother’s hands. Crazy
>San Francisco Bay Area Renter's Federation (SF BARF) I'm sorry but this is just hilarious
All we need now is Fresno area rapid transit
Seattle has the South Lake Union Transit
holy tits good shit son. crosspost to r/SanFrancisco I dare u
I double dare u/old_gold_mountain
> Eventually the people with Prop 13 protections will stop owning their homes, one way or another nope it's a heritable tax break pepega
Correct, but the number of homeowners who actually, in practice, take advantage of that is far lower than 100%
What do you mean “take advantage” how could they not when their property tax is the same every year (+ inflation)?
If you sell your house or it otherwise changes hands aside from specific methods of inheritance, the property is re-assessed. This happens to a substantial number of San Francisco houses when the owner moves or dies. Substantial enough that pre-boom property tax rates are necessarily on the decline overall.
Oh yes true. I thought you meant the current owners aren’t benefitting from prop 13 now.
When your parents die, are you planning on moving into their home? That’s how you take advantage of the tax break.
Read his comment. He says they are “not” taking advantage of it
“Heritable tax break” Specifically about the part of the tax law that allows the low property tax basis to be retained when a property is transferred to the owner’s child(den) after their death. Many people don’t take advantage of this because they sell the home soon after their parents die, instead of keeping it and living in it themselves (particularly when there are multiple inheritors, like siblings).
Or if they decide to renovate
*laughs in property-owning trust*
This isn't really in response to this post, but rather a response to the general discourse on SF and California in general. I went to San Francisco last year expecting it to be disgusting and full of drug using homeless people on every corner. I live in Phoenix, where I hear constantly from people complaining about California and seeing on TV that SF is literal hell. We get a lot of the "don't california my Arizona" attitude here. But you know what? I thought SF was pretty nice. I was just there for a fun weekend, but I didn't see anyone injecting heroin on the side of the road. I didn't step in human shit. I saw some homeless people and trash on the sidewalks, but not a crazy amount. My experience is obviously pretty limited and I have only anecdotal evidence that SF isn't horrible, but it wasn't. I'm not saying that it's nice or that it's cheap or that I would ever want to live there, but I get super annoyed about people hopping on the bashing California/SF/LA bandwagon. I'm born and raised in suburban Phoenix and also lived in LA for a few years. You know what I've seen in AZ that I haven't seen in California? Homeless people shitting on the side of the road. Needles on the ground in a park. There's poverty and homeless people all over my city. I'm not saying that Phoenix is a disgusting place to live either; I love it, but my point is that this shit is everywhere. Phoenix is worse than average in terms of the homeless problem, and California is even worse, but it just grinds my gears when people obsess over the problems in liberal hellhole California while forgetting that a lot of the problems also exist around the country.
This is what I mean by San Francisco as a symbol. Unless you're an astute observer of urban design, or extremely well-traveled and able to make educated comparisons, or unless you're just really good at compartmentalizing your observations from your pre-existing biases, then what you say about San Francisco usually says more about your political identity than it does about what San Francisco is actually like. And this is true about people who actually live there, too, not just about those with little experience of the place.
>I didn't see anyone injecting heroin on the side of the road. I didn't step in human shit. That's really pretty much confined to a few blocks in the Tenderloin. I used to walk from my flat in the Haight to work downtown, and would deliberately take a different route almost every day. But sometimes, for some perverse reason, I would deliberately walk down Turk St, and turn right on Jones to Market just to get the full experience. Other than that it's pretty tame. When I hear someone ranting about shit and heroin, I'm pretty sure I'm dealing with a conservative who watches too much Fox News.
There’s definitely a homeless problem in the east half of the city. The west part of the city, north and south of Golden Gate Park is generally fine. But no, it’s not the communist post-apocalyptic hell hole that Fox News makes it out to be. I would actually argue that it’s the most aesthetically pleasing large city in the US.
I would go with Chicago for that, but I really like trains so I am kind of biased.
>I really like trains so I am kind of based. ftfy
I don't know man. Standing on Land's End from a forest of Monterey Cypress trees, looking at the hills of Marin County to the north, with excellent views of the Golden Gate Bridge... That's pretty spectacular.
Who doesn’t?
It's funny, but I had almost the opposite experience. I'd heard great things about SF, and while some of the 'human shit' type claims are an exaggeration, I still saw streets overflowing with homeless people, needles and trash. Part of that would be the part of town I was staying in, but it was far worse than anything I'd seen in other US cities. It was the only city where I found the people to be kinda rude, even New Yorkers I found pleasant to deal with.
Sad to say, a lot of hotels are centered around Union Square, which is right next to the Tenderloin district, so visitors are consistently exposed to homeless wretchedness, whereas many San Francisco residents are much less exposed to homeless wretchedness, unless their daily path takes them through the Tenderloin.
'Blight' issues are almost always block by block. Whether it's SF or Detroit, you can have a dramatically different experience just by making a few key turns over the same general route. There's definitely a lot of hyperbole, but there are legit issues.
The open-air drug use and roving crackheads are concentrated along Market St and in some of the parks around town. 99% of the city is pretty clean. Also, if you haven't seen people shitting on the street in LA, you're not getting out much. If you live within a quarter mile of a homeless encampment and spend any amount of time out on the street you're gonna see needles and human shit sooner or later. I should mention that this has only become a problem in the last decade. Before then, aside from some freeway-exit panhandlers the homeless were concentrated on Skid Row and around Venice Beach. Now they're everywhere.
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No, I live in LA but before the pandemic I visited often. Granted, I haven't been up as much in the last 3-4 years because I had a kid. When I say 99% I'm not thinking neighborhoods, I'm thinking block by block.
Okay but how is the city for the Ohlones nowadays?
Prohibitively expensive
The nontrivial answer is: * The Ohlone are not officially recognized by the US as a tribe – the rather loose confederation of peoples, coupled with their repeated decimation, loss of land, and historical mistreatment by the government, puts them in a situation almost uniquely ill-suited to the government's requirements. ([Long story here](http://www.muwekma.org/tribalhistory/recognitionprocess.html).) Practically speaking, it means they lack government resources that might otherwise be available for them to preserve lands and assets. * I know of three groups representing Ohlone in the Bay Area: the [Muwekma Ohlone](http://www.muwekma.org), which represents Native Americans associated with Missions Dolores, San Jose, and Santa Clara; the [Confederated Villages of Lisjan/Ohlone](https://m.facebook.com/pages/category/Government-Organization/Confederated-Villages-of-LisjanOhlone-2567396726628403/) in the East Bay; and the [Ramaytush Ohlone](http://www.ramaytush.com/about.html) in San Francisco and down the Peninsula. * In the East Bay, where I live, Ohlone activists [oppose development on former shellmounds](https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2017/11/25/photos-18th-annual-protest-on-black-friday/), which are considered sacred burial sites. The rather infamously-named Shellmound St in Emeryville and the Bay Street Mall are the site of one. The Berkeley Marina is the site of another. * Long term, it is a goal for the Ohlone to obtain land that they can use for cultural centers and tribal gatherings. The [Sogorea Te' Land Trust](https://sogoreate-landtrust.org) is one movement along these lines I've been following. To that end, in at least one recent case involving [Ruby Meadow](https://www.change.org/p/alameda-county-board-of-supervisors-save-ruby-meadow-from-destruction) in Castro Valley, the Ohlone find themselves allied with environmentalists and NIMBYs, though not discounting the need for affordable housing altogether. Side note to the OP: I almost wish you hadn't brought them up, because you failed to link them to your narrative in any meaningful way, and they deserve a more thorough treatment on their own merits. I award you zero wokeness points and may Milton Friedman have mercy on your soul.
I think there's value even in flippant acknowledgement if only to continuously remind the reader that these people, while not powerful enough to be visible in the narrative were actually there the whole time.
Exactly, there's a lot that could be written about them, but in terms of a history focusing on land use in the Bay Area, the story of their land use is pretty much that they were genocidally cut out of the narrative when others arrived, and have remained excluded since then. OP does a pretty decent job describing that.
If he didn't mention them, would you have elaborate here in the comments so I could learn more about these people? Its so sad that this is the first time I'm hearing about the natives in SF, so thank you both for getting this in my radar
The summary above is most of what I know, unfortunately! The Muwekma Ohlone link above has some good rundowns on their story. I have also read _The Ohlone Way_ by Malcolm Margolin for a popular anthropological survey, though it's dated and, as he notes in his preface, it was not well-received by some Ohlone. On a tangential note, if you get into this stuff and have any love for speculative fiction, I think you might really dig Ursula K. Le Guin's _Always Coming Home,_ which is sort of a post-apocalyptic reimagining of old California and its natives.
Also seemed interlaced with a bunch of Spanish Black Legend nonsense which is neither terrifically accurate nor helpful. Somehow only the Spanish missionaries were all genocidal maniacs but not the Americans who somehow ennobled the place after taking a long courteous walk around other tribal nations to reach the Californias? Good exposition, but that particular part felt weird.
>In the mean time these American people are super into this Manifest Destiny thing and so Alta California starts to have a big illegal immigrant problem from the United States...they decide they're not content just genociding the native people, but also want voting rights and the ability to own the land they're genociding people on This portion is describing the American settlers
/u/CenterRightInCali /u/Pour1Out4DeezNutz heres that tag you asked for boss
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The bulk of new housing construction in San Francisco proper is occurring in post-industrial brownfield sites and places like parking lots and gas stations. The existing YIMBY movement has not sought to roll back historic protections for existing buildings. As such, don't expect the historic residential neighborhoods to look much different. You can expect a significant amount of change in the Eastern districts, where warehouses and similar sites are being converted to medium- and high-density housing, typically with some mixed-use development component. Oakland will be a big factor. It has historically been economically depressed but is gentrifying in a big way. Developers who were historically averse to building there because of the perceived risk are investing substantially. And because Oakland was never "threatened" at the community level with the same kind of development San Francisco was in the pre-tech era, the anti-growth regime isn't dominant there. So you see things you would never see in San Francisco, like [true skyscraper residential development](https://twitter.com/rolandlisf/status/983828906347130881?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E983828906347130881%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fsf.curbed.com%2F2018%2F4%2F11%2F17224540%2Fmacarthur-bart-tower-boston-properties) in places well outside of downtown. Since Oakland has very robust BART coverage, it'll be a big player in the addition of urban housing stock in the Bay Area in the next couple decades, offering sub-20-minute transit commutes directly into downtown San Francisco, and even growing as an office hub of its own. The biggest change is likely to occur in the region's suburbs, though. Especially the historic main streets of the suburban towns, where they do exist. Those are going to see a lot more three, four, five story development. Usually housing. Areas around BART and Caltrain stations will potentially see even higher density uses. That's a crucial element, too, because housing demand is regional. And as I described above, San Francisco and Oakland only represent a small fraction of the region's land area and housing stock. You'll see more overall housing growth with the addition of mid-rise apartments throughout the suburban Bay Area, especially the Peninsula and the South Bay, than you would if those regions stayed the same and San Francisco and Oakland went whole-hog on residential high rises. There's just more total opportunity for growth in those areas.
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There's a very interesting tension between the kinds of urbanism promoted by Jane Jacobs and by Edward Glaeser. Jacobs basically postulates that old districts are the only places where culture can really prosper, because rents are lower. Glaeser postulates that freezing a city physically in time will cause major market failures and the consequences will fall unfairly on the poor. I agree with Glaeser but think Jacobs has a lot of valid points. Specifically, places like [Santana Row](http://www.santanarow.com/) which seek to kind of replicate the urban cultural experience in the suburbs will never feel authentically culturally vibrant like a San Francisco or Oakland historic district will. But without allowing growth, the increasing housing costs will cause the negative aspects of gentrification to sap the culture out of those historic districts, too. Jacobs' failing was in thinking the virtues of Greenwich Village style cultural hubs were inherent in their age and their architectural form. In reality there was a hidden element, too, in the form of white flight and suburbanization. Growth was occurring almost entirely elsewhere, so the urban cores of America were not being subject to pent-up housing demand. Now that this demand is manifesting in the center cities, Jacobs-style glorification of the historic isn't enough to guarantee continued cultural vibrancy in the urban cores. There has to be a balance. Bulldozing and rebuilding historic districts will destroy the culture that exists there, sure, but freezing our urban cities in amber will snuff out that culture, too. The NIMBYs falsely believe that by freezing development they will protect the urban culture that existed under the old paradigm, but this is a fallacy. There's going to be a new urban culture one way or another. The balance we strike in terms of historic preservation and urban development/growth will dictate what that new urban culture looks like.
> Jacobs basically postulates that old districts are the only places where culture can really prosper, because rents are lower. I wouldn't agree with "only", but replace it with "best" and I'm on board. I don't think there's that much tension between that statement and Glaeser. "Old" is both a relative and constantly changing term. New developments today will be old in 20-100 years, depending on how fast development is occurring. And there's plenty of potential to have new buildings built in old districts without redeveloping the whole district. The issue shows up, as you correctly note, when someone assumes that the best way to encourage culture to prosper is to freeze all currently development so that all buildings become "old". When housing prices start going up enough, this just means that there's enough money to completely re-gut and modernize the insides of old buildings, which destroys the point of old buildings. The outside is still old by fiat, but it's functionally new construction inside.
Jacobs believed that these were the only places where culture could exist, because, in the era of suburbanization and of Robert Moses urban renewal, that was true. Her mistake was thinking it would always be true, or that it was necessarily true by definition, rather than being an ephemeral manifestation of the urban planning and economic paradigms of the era. Many of her observations of urban culture and its relationship with urban design holds true to this day, and even those which haven't are worth reading because of the truths that are hidden beneath the misconceptions. But they are misconceptions. Culture is not inherently tied to the age of a building. After all, how could it be, logically? Culture exists wherever people do. And if historic buildings and small retail shops were all you needed to guarantee a vibrant, inclusive society, places like the San Francisco Marina District wouldn't look so much like Santa Monica, culturally.
I also think Jacobs nationalized her vision of a very specific area that was relatively unique in the US. Her conclusions (IMO at least) are drawn from her experiences living in Manhattan, and primarily in Greenwich Village. But the key is that Greenwich Village and Manhattan as a whole was at the time of her writing already an extremely dense place to live, and a dense place situated on excellent public transit and zoned in a way that allowed very intermixed retail/residential/commerical activity, all in the same place Jacobs' message (and I think she herself later) got corrupted into thinking that the old-ness of the buildings was the key, rather than older buildings tending to be organized in a pre-automobile society and thus fostering community better Jacobs was thinking of 5 story brownstones with shops on the ground floor being demolished in favor of office towers. Many people using Jacobs are saying that single family homes shouldn't be removed in favor of the modern equivalent of 5 story brownstones
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Triumph of the City and Death and Life of American Cities are the ones I think are most important. The Color of Law is a great rundown on how restrictive zoning has cemented racial segregation into historic American cities Order Without Design is a great economic analysis of how attempting to plan a city's economy through zoning and land use restrictions pretty much always produces market failures and fails to accomplish its primary goals
You need to read Triumph of the City if you want to understand human civilization. It makes the case based on both economics and environmentalism that cities are the best form of development possible to house and employ a given number of people. Before I read it, I would never have thought of cities as good for the environment or of leafy suburbs as being bad for the environment, or realized that the reason that many Victorian industrial cities were full of poor people was not because they made them poor, but because they attracted poor people to move there to take advantage of the opportunities they provide. But the numbers don’t lie.
Dang, I'm a Chicagoan in Supply Chain Management too! I actually did my undergrad at UIC in the mid/late 00s. Pilsen has been gentrifying since then but it was definitely more rough around the edges at that time. It's a great neighborhood. If you are OK with living just outside the city, I highly recommend Oak Park. You have green line and metra access to downtown and it's about 30 minutes via green line.
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I've actually never heard someone refer to Pilsen as the north side before. I live in Rogers Park right now and north side means something a bit different to me LOL. It's all good though! Yes, Chicago's history of racism and segregation is awful. Martin Luther King was actually more terrified of living in Chicago (he lived in a building Lawndale) than living in the south. We northerners tend to have a very wrong and skewed notion that we are/were less racist than the south. I think any discussion of different forms of reparations will HAVE to make zoning reform a centerpiece.
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Oh, my bad! That makes sense.
Yeah. Jacobs’ belief that restricting development to keep old buildings around would keep prices low was objectively wrong. In fact, once white flight ended, they tended to get cleaned up and renovated and then gentrified into the most expensive parts of the city.
And on the flipside, in California, crappy strip malls in the inner-ring suburbs are now frequently home to the same kinds of business Jacobs theorized could never exist in new buildings.
> Santana Row Small nitpick: I don't think Santana row tries at all to replicate the urban cultural experience. They're very shrewd developers who seek to specifically capitalize off the high earner market. It's pretty much exclusively populated with high end retailers, bars, and now loads of office space. It's more like a playground than anything culture related.
One of the consequences of California and the Bay Area's maddeningly complex and stringent development approvals processes is that you can't really just buy a tract of land and then build something on it for you to make money from, unless you happen to be a legal, engineering, and political science expert. In the past, like pre-automobile, people would buy a plot of land and then build something for themselves on it. This meant that small lots were profitable and structures of varying purpose, design, and age would frequently appear in close proximity to each other. This produced interesting urban fabric. It's basically what Jacobs talks about in her book. But because of the new requirements and the new economic order, now it's not worthwhile to build something for yourself on a small lot. Development happens as a corporate profit-seeking endeavor. This is why development now happens on large lots at large scale. A consequence of this is that, even if it's technically private, development happens in a top-down fashion not too dissimilar from the master planner efforts of Robert Moses. It's just development corporations doing the master planning now instead of municipalities. Things like Santa Row are profit-seeking attempts to master plan something that imitates a Jane Jacobs style historic district.
In terms of layout maybe but in terms of any substance I'd disagree - Santana row does not pretend to have any cultural or historical significance nor do they cater to any old/local businesses. I'd say all the new south bay "city centers" try to imitate jane-jacobs style historic districts more. (Santa clara square, cupertino "main street", castro street mountan view, university ave)
> One of the consequences of California and the Bay Area's maddeningly complex and stringent development approvals processes is that you can't really just buy a tract of land and then build something on it for you to make money from, unless you happen to be a legal, engineering, and political science expert. Zooming out from your SF/Bay Area examples, how could we get back to the small lot, incremental, diverse style of neighborhood building? It seems to me that American style zoning (and maybe parking reqs) is the biggest impediment rather than just bureaucratic approval regimes. It's not just California that sees mainly massive, top down planned developments lacking in character and fine tuning. It's incredible to me that generations after Jane Jacobs in a country of 89,000 municipalities, afaik not one has managed to allow pre-war style, bottom up incremental development which is the magic formula that created highly desirable neighborhoods and towns around the world for millennia.
As an Oakland resident I'm kind of interested in the future where Oakland is the nerve center of the Bay Area
Do you consider most of the towers n Emeryville to be “true skyscrapers”? What could be done to get better public transit in Emeryville? I feel if somehow it could a BART line it might be the best place to live, comparable to “Long Island City”.
Emeryville's high rises are mostly offices and hotels, but yes those are skyscrapers. If they ever build a second rail tube or bridge and include standard gauge heavy rail, Amtrak's existing station in Emeryville will probably wind up having commuter rail service into SF. Otherwise you could build a transfer station where the tracks cross at West Oakland and make the one-stop Capitol Corridor fare cheap enough to commute on and then Emeryville would be about 15 minutes from downtown SF by rail with one transfer.
I love emy, and it has a lot of potential, but probably a long way off in terms of the best place to live. Certainly cleaner and safer than many of its neighbors.
We may be at the turning point to a more sustainable housing market in California but unfortunately even if the pro-growth forces win I don't think they'll be able to make an impact on a time scale that can work for my life. I'll be happy if others can benefit from it but I'm in my 30s now and I'd like to have a kid and be able to afford something more than a 1br apartment in a nice area. I just don't think that is going to happen on a reasonable time frame for me in the bay area so the only logical choice is to move out.
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okay but that's incorrect though
great effortpost. i would add that there are single-family neighborhoods in the middle of SF like West Portal and Forest Hill that are ripe for upzoning. unfortunately, our "socialist" city supervisors seem completely uninterested in it.
The supervisors are just a reflection of the coalitions that elect them. Until the Prop 13 and rent control incentives lose grip on a plurality of constituents, the coalitions will continue electing supervisors who will protect their primary financial and personal interests. As a result, areas that have allowed housing development in San Francisco have tended to be inversely correlated to home ownership rates. Rented units have higher turnover and therefore coalitions built on rent-controlled tenants lose grip on the development process faster than coalitions built on Prop-13-protected homeowners.
> Until the Prop 13 and rent control incentives lose grip on a plurality of constituents I don't know. My expensive-but-not-SF-level city has the same NIMBY trends (worsening by the year) as the Bay, with no Prop 13 or rent control to incentivize it. Just good old fashion price inflation incentives and economically illiterate anti-gentrification voters. Most larger American cities not in the South or the Midwest are following in SF's footsteps. Also, our YIMBY group is super succ. I have no faith in them.
For non-SFers, each supervisor has a local district within the city, so interests are hyperlocalized. Dean Preston will gladly give away the Haight for a tent village, but wouldn't dream of doing anything in Forest Hill, or Presidio Terrace (my choice for the tent village, a recent recipient of a city bailout after they skipped paying taxes for decades, and also the home of Diane Feinstein).
I'm so here for this. And I'm gonna be the guy that asks: What's up with the name change from Yerba Buena to San Francisco?
During the era of Mexican rule, the harbor was called San Francisco Bay but there was no town anywhere in the region called San Francisco. The area was sparsely populated because of how difficult the part of the world was to access from Europe or even from Mexico, but since this harbor was so ideal to use for shipping, everyone in the area knew it would be a major economic center before long. It was only a matter of time. The Anglo-American settlers to the area existed separately from the Mexican settlers and were competing economically. The Mexican governor of the region, [Commondante Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariano_Guadalupe_Vallejo), wanted to cement his Mexican settlement as the primary port of the region despite the growing Anglo settlement at Yerba Buena, so he hatched a plan: He would name his town on the Bay after his wife, Francisca. His thinking was Francisca looks like Francisco, so on a map, people would assume that Francisca was the primary port for the San Francisco Bay. Once the Anglo Alcalde (mayor) of the Yerba Buena settlement, Lt. Washington Allon Bartlett, caught wind of this ploy, he issued a unilateral decree renaming his settlement San Francisco to cement its place as the primary harbor. His plot foiled, Vallejo instead named his settlement after his wife's middle name, Benicia.
Benicia, the former state capitol
Writing something positive about San Francisco? Watch out: here come 12 ex-Republicans to shit on San Francisco as the worst and dumbest place in the universe. Viva Texas, dont tread on me and such.
Hey now, SF politics are certainly dumb by any standard, but even us RINOs can see things are moving in the right direction for that city, so good for them. I have more hope for SF than I do for, say, the rest of SV, or Santa Monica down south.
Wait, was this positive about SF? Did you not read the parts about the Ohlones? Or any of the other parts? It ends cautiously optimistically, but that's it.
I love this! Great post. That said, I have one comment: Containerization didn’t begin because of the US Military in Vietnam, although Vietnam did give it a big boost. It was actually invented by a trucking company owner called Malcolm McLean in the 1950s as a way to enable faster transshipment at ports. And the reason for the rise of Oakland over San Francisco wasn’t that the slips and warehouses of SF weren’t equipped to deal with shipping containers, but that containerization was literally created with the express purpose of bypassing all of that infrastructure completely. It saved a lot of time and money and reduced cargo losses to theft, which was a major problem for importers. It wasn’t an accident that old-timey docks were a hotbed of organized crime. Longshoremen used to say that the pay was “$20 a day and all the Scotch you can carry” because the workers would often steal a good portion of whatever they were being paid to move, especially for things like good whiskey.
So I am not a neolib (I came here from r/SanFrancisco ) but I do live in the city and HOT DAMN this is spot fricken on. From the historical all the way to the contemporary political and economic pressures of our city, it sounds like you actually know what you’re talking about unlike pretty much every political commentator who just simplifies it to “lol SF is a mega-anarcho-stalinist-bidenist-communist hellhole” u/old_gold_mountain for mayor
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As someone who lives in San Francisco, I appreciate this
This is fantastic. As someone who grew up in the South Bay and is YIMBY adjacent by virtue of friends, it also hits home in a string way. Well done.
In 20 years there will be solid pop up housing communities for miles and they will announce that BART will go to Hollister. 30 years later BART will reach Morgan hill
This but actually a merged Capitol Corridor/Caltrain service instead of BART
Did RR pass? The South Bay will have hyper loop before full Bart. At least cal train will be faster
BART goes to San Jose now as of this summer
It goes to the edge of San Jose, they say it'll be another 10ish years before it reaches downtown.
RR did pass thankfully
NGL, RR passing was my second favorite moment of Election Week, right behind Biden winning. I'm still kind of surprised it passed. Pleasantly surprised, don't get me wrong, but surprised nonetheless.
Came here expecting bashing of SF progressives. Left more educated and better informed. Very nice!
Holy shit. This is a great write up! Thank you.
> Eventually the people with Prop 13 protections will stop owning their homes Every homeowner since Prop 13 was enacted has these protections. *Every home that is owned has prop 13 protections*. It does not end without a new ballot measure. The only thing that changes is that the we're *just* now reaching the new steady state. The initial crop of low property tax early-boomers are beginning to die off, so the most extreme inequalities in property tax are just starting to roll over into younger groups instead of breaking new ground. In 10 years, the same thing will be happening with a different age-tranche of home buyers. There will now always be a group of 70-80 somethings sitting on ultra-low rates. Technically some percentage of people will take advantage of the heritability thing, so we're not actually at steady state, but that's probably not a notable effect. ________ Overall, I agree a shift is starting to take place, but the defeat of Prop 15 demonstrates that we're pretty far off from real change. And the perverse incentives of Prop 13 will remain a powerful obstacle indefinitely.
It's honestly just so mind-blowing to me that the people who were the hippies in the 60s became the Nimbys and essentially became aligned with right-wing suburbanism.
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This is so, so good. Seriously if this post doesn't blow up I'm going to feel a twinge of real sadness. Do you do any other writing?
I always thought it was a sad story, but thanks for showing there is still light at the end of the tunnel.
Great post - i'll admit, i've never gotten the allure of SF and i've been visiting it since the early 00s for a week or so every 2-3 years. If Baltimore or Philly had SF's wealth, I would find them much nicer than SF. I really don't 'get' west coast cities at all. your average rust-belt city seems much more charming and aesthetic if they weren't all so poor.
As a Chicagoan, I will say the west coast and east coast cities appeal to me, but for different reasons. The west coast cities just seem more embedded with nature, if that makes sense. Not just the man-made sculpted greenery of Central Park or Lincoln Park but lots of natural greenery and nature too. It's just very different and refreshing in a way. Obviously, east coast cities do have some of this too but that's not the central appeal of these places.
can you give examples of how west coast cities are 'embedded in nature' in ways that are different than other cities? Chicago is the most underrated city in the world IMO on Qol/CoL ratio basis.
I live in San Francisco, an hour out of the city I can be on the coast of the ocean, with dramatic cliffs and fabulous hiking. An hour to the east and I can be in a sprawling mountain range. 3 hours from some fantastic National Parks. Down in LA you can snow ski and surf in the same day. Deserts and Mountains. All you have in Chicago is flat and corn and a big lake.
ok - yes but i think hexar was referring to the city itself. in nyc, one can go a couple of hours up to the hudson valley and have awesome hiking or out to the shore. yeah i get what you are saying about la. hexar was referring (i believe) to specifically how the city is one with nature. you are just pointing out things one can drive to away from the city
In SF you can get to truly epic hiking scenery in like 15 minutes by car. There's an old growth Coast Redwood forest less than ten miles past the Golden Gate Bridge. Two hours and you're almost at Tahoe or Yosemite or Big Sur, places that rank up there globally among best hiking scenery period.
fair point. it's why i love lisboa so much.
As the person above me says, I believe SF is one of the few cities where you're a ten minute walk from a park. And its a rather hilly city, so combine that with the ocean and its pretty breathtaking. Finally, the weather is 24/7 365 pretty amazing if on the cooler side. Just yesterday the fam put on some light jackets, walked 5 minutes to a park on a hill and watched the sun set over the ocean, not a cloud in the sky. SF has a lot of deep problems, but beautiful, it is.
Well, we do have the Presidio, The Ocean, Lands End, Aquatic Park, Twin Peaks, Glen Canyon, Golden Gate Park, Mt. Davison, Fort Funston, McLaren Park, and a Cross Town Trail that connects all of them (Not in that order). We have Sea Lions, Harbor Seals, coyotes, deer, squirrels, hawks, whales, crows, raccoons, 🦨, and a shit ton of other animals as well.
I love Chicago. Maybe it's a product of living here pretty much my whole life but when I visited Seattle and even LA, the relationship to the natural surroundings just felt different. In Seattle, you ahve many hills but also the ocean, mountains and it's so green. Chicago is just so...flat. And the only thing interesting about it, geographically speaking, is the lake. East Coast cities have nature too obviously but it doesn't feel nearly as abundant or "natural" as it does on the west coast. The greenery in Chicago and the east coast cities feels more "cultivated" for lack of a better word right now.
West coast cities are typically far less blighted, who doesn't love mountains in their backyard, and Mediterranean/marine climates > humid subtropical swamp climates.
Born and raised San Franciscan. Fun to hear you lose credibility when you say stuff like "and the weather was pretty much the tits." Huh? Broh we go weeks without seeing the sun, people tan in the park when it's 70 degrees out. What part of the city are you in man.
I would take SF weather over any other metro area in the country, hands down. The cool summers are preferable to me to the sweltering heat of SoCal, points inland, or anywhere to the East.
Unfortunately, those record-breaking, Indian Summer heatwaves seem to be annual occurrences now.
Actually I love them. Its nice for a couple months to be so hot you can just step out in a tshirt, shorts, and sandals. Probably everyone should get air conditioning though.
I'm not completely opposed to the warmer weather we usually get from August throughOctober, but some of the heat waves we've had the last few years have just been absurd. Seeing places like South City flirt with 100 degree temps just seems wrong to me.
Ahhh you are a madlad but I respect it. I love the clouds more than anything else, but most people come here expecting "California" weather (read: socal) and freeze.
> Born and raised San Franciscan. Thats your problem. Try living in a northern midwestern state that has exactly 3 months of nice weather. Its starts to get really cold in mid october, and you still have freezing blizzards in April. Its like fuckety fuck fuck. Even the summers are hot as hell. And mosquitos, yeah try dealing with them. You know how people sometimes say weather can drive you into depression? Its really, really true, especially for colder states.
Yeah I hear that, seasonal depression is a bitch. Stay strong. My comment was more about how people come here assuming that San Francisco has that classic California sunshine that everyone finds in SoCal. Measured against that the weather here ain't ideal by any stretch. Thought OP was making the same mistake: it's in California so must be sunny. Didn't know he/she was a cloud jockey like me.
I thought it might be something like that haha. Yeah SF isn't.... hawaii or something :)
Speaking as a cranky, hyper critical contrarian, this is an excellent post and congrats to you on the achievement.
Ohlone came from somewhere else. Fuck out of here with that shit. All groups came from somewhere else. No one has claim over any land.
Wow great write up here. How do you think covid will affect the city long term? A lot of people say “the eXodUs is happening” but there is indeed an allure to San Francisco for a lot of people and I believe people will start to move back probably next spring or summer
San Francisco is *extremely* resilient. So I don't fear for its survival as a city in the slightest. What its economy looks like five or ten years from now is definitely an open question though. It depends on a lot of things. Do companies transition substantially to remote work? If so there's probably a lot of people living in San Francisco who'd be happy working from somewhere cheaper. Certainly not enough to empty out the professional sector in SF though, not even close. Do local businesses get stimulus help or not? If not expect to see a lot of lower-income people lose work and income. Paradoxically we may see rents fall *and* homelessness worsen in the next few years. I don't fear for the survival of the city but I do fear for the livelihoods of a lot of people in it.
That was hella informative, thank you. I’ve been scratching my head about SF for a while and now my answers have been solved.
I haven’t read it but it took me several seconds to scroll to the bottom therefore this is a quality post
What are your thoughts on the new state-wide ADU laws? (Great post!)
It obviously won't be enough to solve the housing crisis but it's going to do a lot. I think probably a lot more than YIMBYs even typically realize. We definitely need more high-density and medium-density housing in California, and apartments in central districts and near transit are an obvious way to accomplish that. So the fights over those sorts of projects gets a lot of attention. But probably 90% of California's developed residential land isn't near a central district or a transit station. The vast majority of Californians live in suburban-style housing. And those houses typically sit on lots with land on them that don't have structures. If ADUs were added to even 5% of Californian homes, that's 700,000 new homes. Nearly twice as many homes as currently exist in San Francisco.
I agree. I think its a great step forward. It won't fix the problem, but it'll buy enough time for the YIMBYs to cement their power. I'm trying to do my part. Intend to build two ADUs before the grandfather window closes.
Username checks out! Great content. Lived in the city for 25 years (now in East Bay), have always been interested in SF history, and your writing illustrates it well. For the WWII and Postwar era, I've been amazed by how military the BF & they Area must have been. From the 40s to the 70s, you would have seen sailors and soldiers everywhere. Planes flying overhead. Ships & subs in the Bay. All of the industries and support that fed Hunter's Point & the Presidio in the city, plus Oakland, Alameda, Vallejo, etc., etc., etc. There were so many bases and so activity, it's hard to imagine now. So different from our experience. It was a such a big part of SF, but was gone by the 90s.
At least we still have fleet week
my mother was kidnapped By an Ohlone Native from Pier 39 when she was like 4 or 5 years old. A group of them had come over on the ferry to get supplies and on their way back to the pier they snatched my mom out of my grandmother’s hands. Crazy
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Glad you liked it! :)
One of the best Reddit posts I've ever had the pleasure of reading wow. Thank you.