The city is free to mandate subsidized housing ratios in the neighborhoods it is worried about becoming gentrified.
Maybe it doesn't because it wants the property tax revenue from the highly paid tech employees that live in these neighborhoods but don't use as many of the city services (including, most evidently, the public transport).
This is like the OPPOSITE of what Wal-Mart is infamous for - paying their employees as little as they can, and forcing them to depend on millions of dollars of federal subsidies like food stamps to actually make ends meet.
Gentrification is a real social concern that needs careful but focused solutions. But it is a goddamn travesty that all the discussion is focused on "Google" (really all Silicon Valley tech companies that are doing this stuff), and the employees that have the audacity of being highly skilled, highly desired, and are willing to put up with a long commute to stay in the city.
They pay city taxes, they put money into the local economy, and they're the enemy? And don't give me the garbage that they spend all their time at the company offices. If that was the case, they'd just live in the valley and save on rent. They live in San Fran because they want to spend money on the things that you can do in San Fran that you can't do in the suburban sprawl hell that is the valley.
This isn't a "99%" thing. Everyone involved here is in the 99%.
> The city is free to mandate subsidized housing ratios in the neighborhoods it is worried about becoming gentrified.
Subsidized housing doesn't prevent gentrification, it just shifts rental profits from landlords to subletters, while depriving the city of tax income on the market value of the housing.
> Gentrification is a real social concern
Why? Why is it that nobody bemaons the pricing of gucci watches or belgian caviar or first class airline seats, but as soon as it's "living in one of the most desirable neighboods in the world", all reason has to go out the window? Clearly not everyone who wants to live in San Francisco can live in San Francisco, why aren't we talking about the millions of people in (for example) Somalia who are being prevented from moving to Mission Hill by gentrification? Why is it just those who by accident of history decided to rent (which by it's very nature is temporary occupancy) in SF that need to be now subsidized?
Gentrification is a real social concern that needs careful but focused solutions
Not really: Up until the Petaluma City Plan was found legal in the 1970s (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petaluma,_California#History for more) and the growth of height-limit acts in major cities, places that experienced growth built more buildings to accommodate new residents, so prices stayed (relatively) low for most people moving to a given locale.
We're seeing the end game of extreme supply restrictions in popular major urban areas: very high prices as increasing demand hits limited supply. The solution is to increase supply, but SF has mostly chosen not to do this: http://www.theatlanticcities.com/housing/2013/10/san-francis... .
Every time I read anything complaining about gentrification in San Francisco, I think about this: http://seattletransitblog.com/2012/04/01/city-looks-to-detro... ("On a recent fact finding mission to both cities, council members and staff met with officials from Detroit and Baltimore to learn from the nation’s leaders in combating gentrification.").
Gentrification is a good thing. You can't do all of the liberal shit San Francisco's municipal government wants to do without a bunch of "2%" types whose taxes can bankroll the whole endeavor. You lose your tax base, and you turn into Detroit or Camden, NJ, and then its game over. If you're a municipal government, 90% of your energies should be spent figuring out how to get businesses and wealthier people to move into and stay in your city. Without the tax base, your great ideas for everything else are totally irrelevant.
I am mystified by housing/anti-gentrification advocates' refusal to consider building new housing stock as a solution to this problem. And what's with "luxury housing" snub? You can't prevent highly paid tech workers from moving into the city without restricting their freedom of movement.. so why not make some room for them? The "historic character" of neighborhoods doesn't have to be ruined, either.
I'm not opposed to something like her Community Benefits Agreements, as long as it actually does speed the approval process up. Of course, it might be hard to get off the ground, since "While the community coalition might be a representative group, there is no oversight to guarantee appropriate representation", and the rest of the community will always be arguing over who has the right to represent them.
> I am mystified by housing/anti-gentrification advocates' refusal to consider building new housing stock as a solution to this problem.
Because an anti-gentrification advocate is bascially saying, "you don't have the right to desire to live in my neighborhood, only I should be allowed to desire to live in my neighborhood"
"Luxury housing" condos often get bought as an investment by someone outside the city rather than by someone within the city looking to move. They tap into demand from outside the city and fail to increase the housing supply and lower housing costs. New York has had a huge problem with foreign investment driving up housing costs [0], and according to realtors I've talked to, foreign investment is playing a large part in driving up SF prices too.
Increasing the housing stock is definitely the solution to out of control prices, but the type of housing built does need to be managed so real demand is met.
tl;dr: The City of San Fancisco should prohibit Google buses until Google promises to magically repeal the laws of economics that rents increase when demand exceeds supply.
EDIT:
The paper specifically recommends that the city prevent Google buses from stopping to pick up passengers until Google enters into "Community Benefits Agreements" (CBAs), the purpose of which is to "foster changes" and "mitigate impact".
Unfortunately, it's obvious to any rational person that Google cannot change human nature via any kind of CBA. Hell, they can't even get me to sign up for Google+!
The thing that makes the paper super-funny, are the types of things the author be included in these CBAs would be agreements to "hire locally", which would require Google to open new offices in San Francicso, which would... further increase rents. Funding for parks, which would... further increase rents. Job training, which would increase wages and... further increase rents.
But hey, we could all live in a Marxist paradise if people would all just magically stop being humans who want what's best for themselves.
Markets are not any more natural to humans than driving cars or using a cellphone. They are a human invention, not something that comes out of nature, or whatever natural humans do.
I wasn't aware until now that "city planning" was so much marxist navel gazing. Am I supposed to just assume that rising rents and gentrification are a bad thing?
Indeed. I waded through the whole thing, trying to mentally rewrite it in a wikipedia NPOV voice. I failed.
I was also heartily amused that IPO deserved a footnote, but the reader is expected to swallow 'neoliberal urbanism' whole.
An interesting undertone is introduced very early on, there is a quote:
“many first-stage (sweat equity) gentrifiers have sold their property to new (very well-off gentrifiers), who are regentrifying property in the neighborhood”
To me this implies the idea that a tech workers income is not sweat equity, that it is either undeserved or un-earned—while this may be true for some, it fails to recognize the work that most of us put in at every level of schooling, at work and on our own time
I've never heard a real person complain about Google offering free buses and keeping the killer traffic on the roads down. It's just something journalists and other professional personalities like to use as an excuse to talk as far as I've seen.
This master’s thesis does provide some evidence that shuttle stops are correlated with localized rent increases. This is a survey rather than an experiment; there’s no way to tell whether the shuttle lines caused rent increases, or whether they simply started in already up-and-coming neighborhoods. It’s also impossible to tell whether the desirability is due to shuttles or other transit; all the chosen shuttle stops (“selected by the San Francisco Tenants’ Union”!) are also within a couple blocks of a Bart station or the intersection of major Muni bus lines. I wish she had at least compared these locations to other Bart and Muni stops that don’t have shuttles (although admittedly this can be difficult). She also makes no attempt to correct for geography or neighborhood differences and just assumes that the annulus around a circle contains “similar units in the same neighborhood.”
I doubt that this would be too useful to the greater debate, however. The real problem is not that a few bus stops are getting too expensive; it’s that the entire city and peninsula are getting too expensive. And to discuss that, we really need to quote the number of housing units and the number of jobs in the area.
Not sure I agree with all of it, the data on rents of 1 and 2 br units within and not within walking distance didn't see particularly convincing. But I really appreciate that the approached it methodically and could share that with us (a requirement for the project I know, I still appreciate it).
I get kind of lost on the economic justice angle though. I'm not sure what an economically "just" city would entail.
This article is confusing cause and effect. Bus routes have been opened to cater to people who choose to live in desirable neighborhoods. It's not the buses that make the neighborhood desirable. If all googlers decided they wanted to live in Marin, I would bet that google would send a bus up there in a heartbeat.
I'd imagine it's at least partially a feedback loop. Bus routes are determined by looking at where employees live, and figuring out the optimal locations for stops, which I'd imagine is how the first routes opened up. For new employees/employees moving who are figuring out where to live, though, proximity to a shuttle stop seems like a relevant factor in the decision. If nothing else, not having shuttle service could be a point against living in a given neighborhood. I'd imagine if you took away shuttle service away from one neighborhood (just for the sake of argument), you would probably see a gradual decline in the number of employees living there.
Thing is, it'd be hard to quantify to what extent shuttle service availability influences the decision making process, so I'm not sure how much we can say about the net effect of shuttle routes on demand for living in a particular neighborhood.
Actually, it's showing just that. The were able to demonstrate that the buildings nearest the bus stops were rising faster than the neighbours - and within each neighbourhood. Googlers weren't congregating around the bus stops before they showed up.
Furthermore, it's showing us how much of the price hike we can attribute to the change just to the buses and not other tenant sources.
I gladly welcome more study in general. Every conversation on this topic is either anti-gentrification hand-wringing or self-victimization by oversensitive tech professionals. More data, less sensationalism.
[+] [-] npinguy|12 years ago|reply
Maybe it doesn't because it wants the property tax revenue from the highly paid tech employees that live in these neighborhoods but don't use as many of the city services (including, most evidently, the public transport).
This is like the OPPOSITE of what Wal-Mart is infamous for - paying their employees as little as they can, and forcing them to depend on millions of dollars of federal subsidies like food stamps to actually make ends meet.
Gentrification is a real social concern that needs careful but focused solutions. But it is a goddamn travesty that all the discussion is focused on "Google" (really all Silicon Valley tech companies that are doing this stuff), and the employees that have the audacity of being highly skilled, highly desired, and are willing to put up with a long commute to stay in the city.
They pay city taxes, they put money into the local economy, and they're the enemy? And don't give me the garbage that they spend all their time at the company offices. If that was the case, they'd just live in the valley and save on rent. They live in San Fran because they want to spend money on the things that you can do in San Fran that you can't do in the suburban sprawl hell that is the valley.
This isn't a "99%" thing. Everyone involved here is in the 99%.
[+] [-] temp42564356|12 years ago|reply
Subsidized housing doesn't prevent gentrification, it just shifts rental profits from landlords to subletters, while depriving the city of tax income on the market value of the housing.
> Gentrification is a real social concern
Why? Why is it that nobody bemaons the pricing of gucci watches or belgian caviar or first class airline seats, but as soon as it's "living in one of the most desirable neighboods in the world", all reason has to go out the window? Clearly not everyone who wants to live in San Francisco can live in San Francisco, why aren't we talking about the millions of people in (for example) Somalia who are being prevented from moving to Mission Hill by gentrification? Why is it just those who by accident of history decided to rent (which by it's very nature is temporary occupancy) in SF that need to be now subsidized?
[+] [-] jseliger|12 years ago|reply
Not really: Up until the Petaluma City Plan was found legal in the 1970s (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petaluma,_California#History for more) and the growth of height-limit acts in major cities, places that experienced growth built more buildings to accommodate new residents, so prices stayed (relatively) low for most people moving to a given locale.
We're seeing the end game of extreme supply restrictions in popular major urban areas: very high prices as increasing demand hits limited supply. The solution is to increase supply, but SF has mostly chosen not to do this: http://www.theatlanticcities.com/housing/2013/10/san-francis... .
[+] [-] rayiner|12 years ago|reply
Gentrification is a good thing. You can't do all of the liberal shit San Francisco's municipal government wants to do without a bunch of "2%" types whose taxes can bankroll the whole endeavor. You lose your tax base, and you turn into Detroit or Camden, NJ, and then its game over. If you're a municipal government, 90% of your energies should be spent figuring out how to get businesses and wealthier people to move into and stay in your city. Without the tax base, your great ideas for everything else are totally irrelevant.
[+] [-] jelkins|12 years ago|reply
I'm not opposed to something like her Community Benefits Agreements, as long as it actually does speed the approval process up. Of course, it might be hard to get off the ground, since "While the community coalition might be a representative group, there is no oversight to guarantee appropriate representation", and the rest of the community will always be arguing over who has the right to represent them.
[+] [-] temp42564356|12 years ago|reply
Because an anti-gentrification advocate is bascially saying, "you don't have the right to desire to live in my neighborhood, only I should be allowed to desire to live in my neighborhood"
[+] [-] lostdog|12 years ago|reply
Increasing the housing stock is definitely the solution to out of control prices, but the type of housing built does need to be managed so real demand is met.
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/nyregion/paying-top-dollar...
[+] [-] temp42564356|12 years ago|reply
EDIT:
The paper specifically recommends that the city prevent Google buses from stopping to pick up passengers until Google enters into "Community Benefits Agreements" (CBAs), the purpose of which is to "foster changes" and "mitigate impact".
Unfortunately, it's obvious to any rational person that Google cannot change human nature via any kind of CBA. Hell, they can't even get me to sign up for Google+!
The thing that makes the paper super-funny, are the types of things the author be included in these CBAs would be agreements to "hire locally", which would require Google to open new offices in San Francicso, which would... further increase rents. Funding for parks, which would... further increase rents. Job training, which would increase wages and... further increase rents.
But hey, we could all live in a Marxist paradise if people would all just magically stop being humans who want what's best for themselves.
[+] [-] nielsbot|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mempko|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevinpet|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pacaro|12 years ago|reply
I was also heartily amused that IPO deserved a footnote, but the reader is expected to swallow 'neoliberal urbanism' whole.
An interesting undertone is introduced very early on, there is a quote:
“many first-stage (sweat equity) gentrifiers have sold their property to new (very well-off gentrifiers), who are regentrifying property in the neighborhood”
To me this implies the idea that a tech workers income is not sweat equity, that it is either undeserved or un-earned—while this may be true for some, it fails to recognize the work that most of us put in at every level of schooling, at work and on our own time
[+] [-] lnanek2|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yonran|12 years ago|reply
I doubt that this would be too useful to the greater debate, however. The real problem is not that a few bus stops are getting too expensive; it’s that the entire city and peninsula are getting too expensive. And to discuss that, we really need to quote the number of housing units and the number of jobs in the area.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|12 years ago|reply
I get kind of lost on the economic justice angle though. I'm not sure what an economically "just" city would entail.
[+] [-] cnorgate|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rodrodrod|12 years ago|reply
Thing is, it'd be hard to quantify to what extent shuttle service availability influences the decision making process, so I'm not sure how much we can say about the net effect of shuttle routes on demand for living in a particular neighborhood.
[+] [-] muzz|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterSear|12 years ago|reply
Furthermore, it's showing us how much of the price hike we can attribute to the change just to the buses and not other tenant sources.
[+] [-] thrownaway2424|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterSear|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chooseybeggar|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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