Looking forward to going back in a couple/few months. Though you might get mugged, public trash receptacles and sidewalks are everywhere. Talk about convenience.
See, avoiding feces, needles, and hobos on the streets of SF is a problem for people who actually walk on those streets. If you can drive by it without having to stop and step out in it, pfft. It’s a potential source of grievance that maybe somebody who actually has to traverse SF streets can exploit - and hey, more power to 'em.
Now, that said and on the other hand, if you are driving down the street and you are actually forced to see someone expelling copious amounts of e-cig vapor into the very same air your vehicle’s a/c is sucking into your space to be actually inhaled into your lungs - now we gots a problem. That shit cannot stand. Not the real shit, that shit.
Last time I was in San Francisco I was up to my necks in homeless people, but the people were nasty too. Like they think they’re better than you because they live in San Francisco. Taipei people may be somewhat clumsy but they try to be polite.
I think this video explains the problem very well.
The lack of city planning and the tech boom is forcing many of San Francisco’s original inhabitants to choose between staying in the city or staying off the streets.
There are ways to resolve that issue, leaving the city as is and to its original inhabitants, while giving the wealthy a place they’d love to call home.
The video drives me a little batshit to watch (all right, a lot batshit), and while I clicked along trying to find the couple minutes where he boils everything down I had no luck.
It’s nearly 30 minutes long. What is his proposal in a nutshell? Or can you just tell us when the content kicks in, a timestamp?
I’m visiting in a few weeks. Haven’t been in years. Planning to visit a cousin who lives near a BART station - I said that I could take it in and walk to her place but she said it’s ‘better’ that she pick me up nowadays.
Yea I swear the guy is just being a tour guide for San Francisco and has no idea what, if anything needs fixed. All he talks about is building a bunch of condos in some disused industrial area.
71% of the homeless in SF once had a house in SF, and SF has one of the worse homelessness issue in the country.
Basically there are two ways to fix the current housing issue in SF. One of course is tear down the old neighborhoods and replace them with high rises. Of course, if you truly love SF that wouldn’t be an option.
So what he proposes is do something like Miami’s Brickell key. Instead of flattening little Havana and other historic Cuban neighborhoods, build a new stretch of high rises along the coast.
Turn this part of town (south of the Giants’ ball park)
That’s interesting, thank you for recapping the video you linked to.
I’m not a resident of SF, likely will never be a resident, so I have no dog in SF’s hunt. That said, such a change would fundamentally alter SF’s skyline. No question about that.
Also, I know that in SF it is extremely costly to build new structures. Even making modifications to existing structures is often prohibitively expensive, in both dollars and time. Much of the cost and the hassle is down to California state and SF local zoning laws and building regulations.
I don’t think San Francisco is serious about solving its housing issues. But if they were serious, then before they build new shore side high rises they really need to think about what home ownership means in SF and in California. Is the American dream in California still to buy a home as an investment? To invest in its maintenance as if it were more a shrine that will resold at a profit than a place to live in? Or is the California dream, as it is colliding with their homeless problem in San Francisco, trying to tell residents that there may be a different and better way?
I grew up in SF and moved back for a few years before moving to Taiwan. There’s no way around it: homelessness in San Francisco is a major problem. That said, there are a lot of complex factors, and like some previous post mentioned, building new high rises is extremely difficult and does not necessarily solve the homeless issue.
The first factor to consider is that San Francisco is 7 square miles and designed for a population of around 1 million people. Current estimates put SF residents somewhere around 3 million, and that doesn’t take into account the millions of people who live outside of the city and commute to it every day. Whenever you create such a high demand for a place that has a finite supply, housing prices will become unrealistic. Yes, building more high rises helps in theory, but geographically speaking, you can never come close to the actual supply needed.
The biggest factors are the laws and regulations for construction in California and San Francisco. There are so many regulations that restrict the construction of new property that the cost to design such property gets extremely inflated. Simply put, the cost of building any new high rises in San Francisco would make even the most socially conscious investors raise rentals and sales costs beyond the amount that would tackle the homeless situation.
A third factor is that San Francisco is on a fault line. This has made many potential investors in real estate cautious in the past. I can think of two luxury condos built in the early 2000s that took well beyond their projected timeline for construction because nobody wanted to invest in them due to how close they were being build to a fault line.
I don’t say any of this to negate the need for more housing in San Francisco, or argue that high rises aren’t worth considering. I only mean to point out that there are factors that make San Francisco’s situation very different than other places, such as Miami.
