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    Pretty TerryHamilton Nolan
    3/09/16 10:02am

    You’re not taking into account capacity. You can’t just say “build more housing.” What does an increase in population do to the roads? The sewage? Trash services? Schools? Transportation? Food services?

    SF has the highest population density of any major city in California. It’s not that more housing is needed, it's that more affordable housing is needed in the City.

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      Hamilton NolanPretty Terry
      3/09/16 10:04am

      In order to have more affordable housing you need more housing period.

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      HypnoCatPretty Terry
      3/09/16 10:08am

      This. I don’t think turning San Fran into Tokyo is the answer.

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    Dave Hamilton Nolan
    3/09/16 9:55am

    HamNo, you know as well we do that ANY new housing in San Francisco will just kick the market rate that much higher, just like NYC. There will be lip service to “affordable housing” with three units for the Poors in a 300 unit building. (“Look, we GAVE them their OWN DOOR!”) Unless there is some serious market crash or massive legislative change, all the new ticky tacky boxes in the world are not going to change the reality on the ground.

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      Hamilton NolanDave
      3/09/16 9:58am

      This is actually not true at all.

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      Dave Hamilton Nolan
      3/09/16 10:00am

      I can only base what I see on NYC, where the conversation seems to revolved a mystical lottery system with Powerball odds and market rate apartments going up like mad. Maybe San Francisco is different, it is after the Liberal Heart of America, but I will believe it when I see it.

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    ReburnsABurningReturnsHamilton Nolan
    3/09/16 9:53am

    Hamilton, I’m a progressive but, [Insert a bunch of pretzel twist logic in here that is a poor attempt to cover up NIMBY-ism that gives no shits about the struggles of people who are less fortunate here].

    So, more housing isn’t the answer because that implies that supply vs. demand and not [string together a bunch of buzzwords about inequality and the establishment here] is the real problem.

    Just because the rich and the Republicans have co-opted basic economic principles to attempt to justify their thuggery, doesn’t mean that those economic principles are not still fundamental forces we need to grapple with in order to solve problems.

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      MBCockReburnsABurningReturns
      3/09/16 9:56am

      But isn’t part of the problem is that SF is a peninsula so you run into the real problem of limited space? The same as NYC so your only choice is to build vertical. That’s why everyone is rushing across the bay to Oakland; turning it into Brooklyn-West.

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      ArtemisReburnsABurningReturns
      3/09/16 9:58am

      Yup. Building more housing is an absurd solution. Implement a system that does not automatically favour rich people. Something along the lines of legislated income based housing. That would be interesting.

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    I Have No Account and I Must PostHamilton Nolan
    3/09/16 9:54am

    Just yesterday (or the day before?) I was listening to an NPR story about how shitty the housing situation in NYC is.

    Maybe you should work on your home city before telling other cities how to do.

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      Hamilton NolanI Have No Account and I Must Post
      3/09/16 9:59am

      I do this all the time! Lemme know if you want some links.

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      LongSnakeI Have No Account and I Must Post
      3/09/16 10:01am

      Hi, is this your first day on Gawker?

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    Low Information BoaterHamilton Nolan
    3/09/16 9:55am

    The problem with San Franciso is people's maddening insistence on living above ground. There is literally (not literally) a limitless space ripe for potential housing development, right underneath your feet! Break out the shovels, and reinforcing timbers, and sun lamps, and make it happen. If subterranean dwellings aren't dispruptive, I don't know what it.

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      TreyLow Information Boater
      3/09/16 9:58am

      That's a fucking terrible idea due to the geology and seismic activity in the area.

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      Low Information BoaterTrey
      3/09/16 9:59am

      It's only a terrible idea if you're not smart enough. I'm pretty sure software developers got this, buddy.

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    Sean BrodyHamilton Nolan
    3/09/16 9:55am

    In Boston even the unions are pitching in an effort to make housing more affordable

    One can argue the merits and the motivations, but it is something.

    http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/…

    After two years of talks, building trades unions, which include plumbers, painters, and electrical workers, are set to roll out separate units that will specialize in apartment construction. Those workers would be paid about one-third less than the unions’ standard commercial rates — $40 an hour in wages and benefits for a painter, for example, instead of $60

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      KludgistSean Brody
      3/09/16 10:12am

      Sorry, $60/hr for a painter? Wow. STEM was definitely the wrong choice.

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      Sean BrodyKludgist
      3/09/16 10:16am

      Sorry, $60/hr for a painter? Wow. STEM was definitely the wrong choice.

      They probably get $40 of that before tax.
      There’s a bunch of benefit deductions in the contract, That 60 would have 7 bucks an hour for pension, another 6 for health and welfare and so on.

      They are well looked after.

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    HypnoCatHamilton Nolan
    3/09/16 10:11am

    Here’s an idea... Maybe change the other end of the equation. Instead of building more housing, maybe the tech industry will finally normalize and stop paying young people obscenely high salaries. Or, why do they all have to be in the Bay Area? move to Denver and Milwaukee already.

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      MyMostPreciousHypnoCat
      3/09/16 10:22am

      Or, why do they all have to be in the Bay Area? move to Denver

      No, don’t move to Denver, the housing situation here is getting just as bad. Nobody wants to build lower or middle income dwellings anywhere other than the shit parts of town, or 100 miles out in the middle of goddamn nowhere.

      The only advantage we have over CA is we have more land area to spread out over, but the public transport is a complete joke and the roads are crap.

      If you’re looking for some place to smoke pot, move to Oregon or Washington. The weather’s nicer and there’s plenty of liberals to make you feel right at home.

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      legaltrutherHypnoCat
      3/09/16 10:36am

      Seriously? Pay people less money is your solution? Have you even stopped to think what would happen with the extra money if companies didn’t pay it to their employees? It goes to the owners of the companies. I am pretty surprised that the liberal solution to the housing crisis is... pay workers less money (and let the corporations keep it!) so that NOBODY can afford the high cost of housing, and then the developers will HAVE to lower the prices!

      Complete fucking lunacy...

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    gramercypoliceHamilton Nolan
    3/09/16 10:02am

    The city will collapse under its own hubris. Why is that a bad thing? I [used to] love San Francisco, but you know what’s not going to make me love it more/again? More people in that tiny, earthquake-inviting, delicate, difficult place. It should be really hard to live there. But physically hard, like, not for the faint of heart or people who risk having a stroke because their wallets are so heavy and their Clinkle stock options didn’t pan out.

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      Whatthefoxsaysgramercypolice
      3/09/16 10:36am

      it’s going to collapse because of the Big One. I remember back in the 90s when seismologists predicted that there was an 84% chance of the Big One hitting by 2017, and I thought, that’s really far off. welp.

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      gramercypoliceWhatthefoxsays
      3/09/16 10:41am

      Lately, most attention has been directed toward a massive quake expected in the PNW. The New Yorker had a great, scary profile of why it’s overdue and how much damage the attendant tidal wave is likely to do to large parts of Oregon and Washington.

      But you’re right. Everybody in SF is simply betting the big one won’t hit until after they’re dead already. But, really, aren’t we all doing that in one way or another?

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    thuggyBearHamilton Nolan
    3/09/16 4:22pm

    I don’t think the solution is to raze SF and build Manhattan in its place. In spite of the wave of insufferable techbros, it is a fucking gorgeous city.

    On the other hand- South San Francisco is a dump. Newark is a dump. Richmond is the current murder capital, I have been told, and I don’t think it is the lost boys.

    The problem lies entirely with the tech industry being a bunch of fucking morons who keep building massive facilities in the same fucking suburban area with no public transit to speak of. It’s fucking ridiculous.

    Google, Facebook, or one of the other massive companies should make a deal with a town like Richmond, for instance, dip into their massive cash supply that they are just sitting on, and loan Richmond the money it needs to build a massive light rail/subway/public transit system and bike paths.

    Then they ought to build a monstrous office park across the street from a monstrous apartment complex. They should also build a new public school where Google employees can take sabbaticals and help teach the local kids side by side with the Google employees’ children with professional teachers.

    Next to that, they should build a massive grocery store that they subsidize for a few years (maybe modeled after the Park Slope Food Coop, where people work in the store to keep prices low while stimulating the local agrarian economy by selling local produce and meat) until it is up and running since most of Richmond is a food desert.

    Employees can move to the North Bay (they could even build a ferry, like they did with the buses) and buy property at 1/3 of what Berkeley/Oakland cost, people in Berkeley/Oakland could take the BART to work, and all of us living out here could have access to a non-barbarous public transit system.

    Why destroy what’s already nice, when you can take a shithole and turn it into a cool place to live?

    Gentrification doesn’t have to be horrible- Facebook could easily move into the area, build schools, fund police. The key is integrate with the existing community, not to displace it.

    God help me, but every since we moved out here, I had to buy my first car at the age of 43. Why did people ever buy these fucking things?

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      mercyxthuggyBear
      3/10/16 12:13am

      Why destroy what’s already nice, when you can take a shithole and turn it into a cool place to live?

      This “shithole” has the most progressive government in the Bay Area from spending years wrangling with Chevron. We have a legion of community activists who fought back 3 million in Chevron campaign spending in 2014 to elect the most forward thinking slate in decades, and the city continues to move forward with supporting community policing, cooperative development, non-profit support, urban gardening expansion, bike paths and the whole nine without a fucking dime of techdudebro monies.

      So put that in your smug ass pipe and smoke it.

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      thuggyBearmercyx
      3/10/16 2:38pm

      I’m glad your lily white ass is opposed to youth at risk getting access to subsidized fresh and healthy food, public transportation, and new, well equipped schools. I’m sure you don’t see the need for them in your hipster paradise.

      However, the rest of us would like to end poverty and give people the same chances the rich kids have.

      Perhaps some day you’ll have a passing thought about someone’s else’s need other than your own.

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    EatTheCheeseNicholsonHamilton Nolan
    3/09/16 9:55am

    I agree that San Francisco is a Twitter-bro hellhole, but they are building more housing - the problem is it just goes to the Twitter-bros and solves nothing. What would really make a difference is if, for example, Marin hadn’t refused a BART extension back in the day, essentially making anyone who commutes using public transit unable to live there and further restricting things geographically.

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      ZzoydEatTheCheeseNicholson
      3/09/16 10:01am

      And therein lies the real answer—public transit. Without it the market will only build what the highest bidder will pay. Essentially it is a public subsidy (i.e., transit), but in this day and age that’s a non-starter. Ya’ know, shrink government to the size of a bath tub, blah, blah, blah. . .

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      EatTheCheeseNicholsonZzoyd
      3/09/16 10:14am

      It really is. SF public transit is terrible for many commuters, but many people who live in the city often don’t mind, because you get a shuttle to take you to Palo Alto and back each day. The whole Marin thing especially irks me. It would be like if 10 years ago, Manhattan was like “you know what? Please don’t extend the subway to Queens.”

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