'Plan To Save Downtown San Francisco From Doom Loop Approved by Lawmakers' (sfstandard.com) 233
An anonymous reader shared this report from the nonprofit journalism site, the San Francisco Standard:
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors on Tuesday approved legislation that aims to shore up the city's beleaguered Downtown by filling empty storefronts and expediting the conversion of underused office buildings into housing. The bill is a major component of Mayor London Breed's recovery agenda. Co-sponsored by Board President Aaron Peskin, it amends the city's planning code to expand residential uses and Downtown office conversions. It also streamlines the review of certain projects, among other changes...
Even with speedier project approvals, converting San Francisco office buildings to housing remains a costly endeavor; few developers have explored the option to date. At an April 3 hearing of the board's Land Use Committee, lawmakers outlined the need for multiple reforms to make conversions economically feasible; Supervisor Dean Preston voiced concerns that even those reforms would not accommodate low-income housing. Many say San Francisco's Downtown is currently caught in a "doom loop" driven by economic knock-on effects of the pandemic, including an office vacancy rate approaching 30% and trophy office towers changing hands at deep discounts...
The bill passed Tuesday is one of several legislative efforts to aid Downtown and the city's overall economy. Initiatives have included legislation to delay tax increases for retail, food service and other businesses hit hard by the pandemic, an "Office Attraction Tax Credit" for new companies opening in the city and a program called "Vacant to Vibrant," which provides grants to businesses which open "pop-up" shops and art spaces in Downtown's empty storefronts.
Even with speedier project approvals, converting San Francisco office buildings to housing remains a costly endeavor; few developers have explored the option to date. At an April 3 hearing of the board's Land Use Committee, lawmakers outlined the need for multiple reforms to make conversions economically feasible; Supervisor Dean Preston voiced concerns that even those reforms would not accommodate low-income housing. Many say San Francisco's Downtown is currently caught in a "doom loop" driven by economic knock-on effects of the pandemic, including an office vacancy rate approaching 30% and trophy office towers changing hands at deep discounts...
The bill passed Tuesday is one of several legislative efforts to aid Downtown and the city's overall economy. Initiatives have included legislation to delay tax increases for retail, food service and other businesses hit hard by the pandemic, an "Office Attraction Tax Credit" for new companies opening in the city and a program called "Vacant to Vibrant," which provides grants to businesses which open "pop-up" shops and art spaces in Downtown's empty storefronts.
They're idiots (Score:3, Insightful)
While this is a positive move, nobody will want to move to the slums, just like nobody wants to shop in the slums or go to the office in the slums, and that's just what downtown SF has turned into. They need to send in the paddywagons to round up and drag away the hobos. Everything else is rearranging the deck chairs.
Re:They're idiots (Score:5, Insightful)
Gentrification happens. If you can convert a block of towers with the lower floors being light commercial, you can create a community that doesn't have much need to leave - and then you can police the hell out of it to ensure anyone breaking laws on the street is carted out.
But criminalizing homelessness or mental illness isn't how you clear the streets - it's by making sure those things are extreme outliers that are most often taken care of by social services, whether that be education, medical care, or unemployment / welfare. It gets the right-wingers in a tizzy, but as long as you don't let the left-wingers con you into continually throwing money at their programs with no oversight it is the most humane AND cost-effective long term solution.
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It depends on the people you fill the buildings with. If the area is still "high crime" then those "light commercial" businesses (stores primarily) won't last long. Especially with the "shoplifting isn't really a crime" policy.
When the people you put into the apartments have pride in their area and work to keep it up then there is a greater chance of success. If you just stuff the apartments without a plan then you'll get the drug dealers mixed in, drug users who will steal to get their next fix, and peo
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That's not actually the problem on the table here since nobody has the money to turn these things into "affordable housing" including the city or state.
If/when they find anyone to redevelop these buildings it'll be into "luxury" units that will be $1Mil+. But idk who's going to buy them. Maybe the Chinese? (the ones from China, not Chinatown)
I'm really curious what's going to happen.
Re:They're idiots (Score:5, Interesting)
Government and secular NGOs seem to have done a very poor job of managing cost/benefit with California's programs. I've been an atheist since 1st grade, but even I have noticed that religious charity, both inside and outside of congregations, has been much better at being effective - especially the inter-congregation work, where the parishioners know the people they're helping, and can tell the difference between someone who is trying, and someone who is scamming.
There is no public policy answer to this, but America needs to rediscover religious traditions that reduce resentment and increase gratitude. Maybe this ends up happening by the mass importation of muslims and hispanic catholics. Or maybe the Mormons outbreed us all.
The story of compassionate governance in California is one of failed promises. They should try *not* doing something for a change, and let the vacuums be filled by the latent virtue of charity unused in most of the citizens of their state.
Re:They're idiots (Score:4, Insightful)
Nobody wants to open a lovely pour over organic fair trade café when there's a 6' homeless dude sleeping, defecating, and jerking off in the front while screaming incoherently and periodically shooting up. And nobody wants to live above the cafe either.
Criminalizing homelessness doesn't end homelessness, but it absolutely does clear the streets and allow for productive folk to get on with life.
Re:They're idiots (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody wants to open a lovely pour over organic fair trade café when there's a 6' homeless dude sleeping, defecating, and jerking off in the front while screaming incoherently and periodically shooting up. And nobody wants to live above the cafe either.
Criminalizing homelessness doesn't end homelessness, but it absolutely does clear the streets and allow for productive folk to get on with life.
I can be voted down, but it's all 100% true.
Re:They're idiots (Score:5, Insightful)
Criminalizing homelessness doesn't end homelessness, but it absolutely does clear the streets and allow for productive folk to get on with life.
I can be voted down, but it's all 100% true.
No, it isn't. Your first sentence, while denoting a clear bias, was actually fairly accurate. That kind of thing does happen, although it's a small minority of the class we're discussing, and people do not tend to enjoy it in the least. But your conclusion is unsupported by facts.
Criminalizing homelessness does not clear the streets. Nobody can afford to incarcerate the homeless. And if they can, it makes far more sense to simply put them in an apartment, which is a lot cheaper. In fact, it is cheaper in every case to not put people into jail or prison. It doesn't matter (except on an ethical or moral level) whether your plan is to do nothing or to care for people, it is always cheaper than using the "justice" system to "solve" your "problem".
In places where homelessness is criminal, you still have homeless. You simply also have a lot of time and money wasted abusing the homeless, when you could spend less of it helping them and have better outcomes for everyone.
I do not propose for even a second that the best solution to "a 6' homeless dude sleeping, defecating, and jerking off in the front while screaming incoherently and periodically shooting up" is to do nothing. The best solution is to help that guy. He might well be a veteran (there's over a 10% chance!) or belong to some other class of person that our society has chewed up and shat out, and should really be considered our responsibility even in a world in which we don't care about others.
I, for one, want to live in a world in which we do — so I reject your premise, and I don't need to ignore the facts adjacent to it to do so.
Criminalizing homelessness (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, criminalizing homelessness makes the problem worse.
You arrest somebody, which costs money, put them in jail, which costs even more money, send them to court(money), try to recover money from them, which besides being about as effective as getting blood from a stone, actually makes it HARDER for them to get a home, because now they have a criminal record(or a bigger one) and even more expenses. For which, if they don't pay(little money, homeless, remember?), you toss them back in jail, which is ev
Re:Criminalizing homelessness (Score:5, Insightful)
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Gentrification happens. If you can convert a block of towers with the lower floors being light commercial, you can create a community that doesn't have much need to leave - and then you can police the hell out of it to ensure anyone breaking laws on the street is carted out.
But criminalizing homelessness or mental illness isn't how you clear the streets - it's by making sure those things are extreme outliers that are most often taken care of by social services, whether that be education, medical care, or unemployment / welfare. It gets the right-wingers in a tizzy, but as long as you don't let the left-wingers con you into continually throwing money at their programs with no oversight it is the most humane AND cost-effective long term solution.
So we start building the projects again? That worked perfectly last time.
The situation is much more complex than the give them a home, money, and all will be great!
And miss me with that right wing instant accusation - I ain't.
There are problems that have been exacerbated in the past - but if we're looking at the mentally ill people, there are very few instances where we can forcibly administer psych drugs. So it probably won't be a good situation to place mentally ill people in apartments. And what
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Who said "projects" or giving away housing? A percentage probably should be - in fact, I'd say there should be housing for every demographic from single professional through family to nursing home resident, and from poor to wealthy. Blue and white collar.
The more you mix it up, the easier it is to manage. It's when you get vast regions of one demographic that issues really start to fester.
Re:They're idiots (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: They're idiots (Score:4, Interesting)
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But criminalizing homelessness or mental illness isn't how you clear the streets
No one does this. Stop with this BS rhetoric.
It's the crime, the shitting on the street, the constant yelling, etc that is "criminalized".
Being homeless doesn't give you a right to shit anywhere you want.
Being mentally ill doesn't give you a right to yell non-stop to anyone you want, much less when you refused treatment.
Re: They're idiots (Score:3)
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It's mostly drugs isn't it? Maybe that should be criminalized, even if it's just a light penalty.
Its the result of the opioid epidemic from last decade. So the drug in question is Heroin (with a lot of meth too, yes I know those are very different drugs, I'm just the messenger). I'm not sure decriminalization is the right move here. There is also plenty of research that says its always a pretty small minority of any group (even the homeless) who commit all the crimes. A big part of this problem is that SF thought it would be a good idea to not enforce petty crimes in a city of 1m people. If you en
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You say they never call the cops anymore. But they do, and cops do show up. Not all the time. But there are prosecutions and convictions.
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Misdemeanors aren't just slaps on the wrists. They can be put in jail for at least a few months, and repeated offenses can become felonies. The problem is the government prosecutors no longer pursue these cases to the fullest possible extent under the law.
That said, if they're short on money, then just let business owners and licensed security personnel beat up the thieves. Then they don't need to police anything. The way laws are setup today, the police are actually protecting the criminals.
Re:They're idiots (Score:5, Informative)
The people we're talking about here are in no position to take advantage of even that. There are already several levels of help available including cash payments to homeless for people who are even halfway functional. The ones on the street aren't.
For example here is an article from the same site about a Chinese single mother with two kids who doesn't speak english. they're in an SRO (single residency occupancy hotel) in Chinatown (basically a boarding house) and have received a Section 8 voucher and are eager to move out. The article is not about how SRO funding is being cut, or section ... it's a about how budget cuts will cut the number of "coordinators" who filled out all the paperwork for her to get the various programs.
https://sfstandard.com/housing... [sfstandard.com]
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Downtown isn't really a slum. There's the small section that's not too nice, but either side of that is pretty upscale. You need to back out a few streets off of market to where it feels more slumlike.
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Re: They're idiots (Score:2, Interesting)
I feel like anyone speaking of SF slums should be required to specify which streets they're talking about. I keep going to SF and I can never find the slums, or the homeless, or the sidewalk feces everyone keeps talking about.
Re: They're idiots (Score:2)
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Work camps. Poor houses. Oh sure, people say, "Oh, but that costs so much." The truth is, the destruction of downtowns across the state is costing hundreds of billions of dollars, not to mention to the loss in quality of life for everyone else. The cost to imprison these wretches is relatively cheaper to the cost of living with them.
Simple answer (Score:5, Insightful)
And do **WHAT** with them?
No-one wants to hear this but we need to bring back large scale mental institutions, which had problems in the past but those problems were lots better than the problems we have without them...
Oh and actually go after Fentanyl dealers and suppliers (more the suppliers).
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And before someone says "Why not help them instead?", my answer to that question is: Why aren't bastions of liberalism like SF not doing th
Re: They're idiots (Score:2)
We actually already do that in Los Angeles. Basically, LA proper is that remote area where they can do what they want. The same is true of some areas like Venice Beach. But basically everywhere else, if they try to camp there, they get picked up, possibly fined, and then dropped off in LA.
It actually works pretty well. Compare basically any other beach in the South Bay with Venice Beach, and you'll see exactly why this really is necessary.
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Have you been to San Francisco? It's a small place. It's 6.5 times smaller than New York City. It's less than half the size of Boston or Milwaukie. It's also a peninsula, surrounded by water on three sides, and its southern border is that of a completely different county, over which SF leadership has no say. Not even the city called South San Francisco is in San Francisco County, it's a completely different government. There just aren't that many "outskirts" to send people to. The two neighborhoods that are
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It's a clever idea, but the treadmill of addiction never ends. If people stopped importing it, California would stop having a supply to give away, and people would start importing it again.
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Put up a tent city with free fentanyl on the outskirts of town and they'll all vanish overnight.
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Poor houses. Work camps. Cheapen the jail.
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Sterilize the hobos, addicts, retards, petty thugs, nutters, and the communists. The problem will attenuate with time.
That was tried once, and they ended up putting your undesireables in special camps, and made certain they were very very warm. And it worked out very very badly.
Eventuaslly those who thought this was a good idea were attenuated, after they were justifiably curb stomped. I see with recent history playing out, you say the quite parts very loudly these days.
Re: They're idiots (Score:2)
Pretty sure that they never cranked up the thermostat on this side of the pond. And the attenuation you speak of is in my honest opinion a sad case of cargo cult thinking where superficial resemblance to something unconscionable is sufficient to discredit an otherwise plausible idea.
The same pathological thinking is at play when nuclear energy is equated with nuclear war and when border enforcement here is equated with border enforcement along the Berlin Wall. To no one's benefit.
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You're right when you point out that no one benefits, but you are really advocating destroying those you look down on.
Re: They're idiots (Score:3)
I am advocating a system where people aren't permitted to indiscriminately export and impose their problems on everyone else.
You aren't permitted to roll coal at 1am on residential streets. You aren't permitted to grab any titties you see or to kill men for sport. You aren't permitted to set fires for the lulz or to defecate or urinate wherever you happen to be standing at the time. All these things impose problems on others and we punish people for doing it to disuade others and to remove the incorrigible
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Re:San Fransico doesn't have slums (Score:5, Informative)
YouTubers cherry-pick the bad areas. What gets more likes? SF today has less homicides than, say, 2010. San Francisco also has a lower homicide rate than most cities including right-wing run cities such as Miami. In fact California in general has a lower homicide rate than Florida in spite of governor De Santis providing us with advice on how to lower homicides and drug overdoses. Maybe he should fix Florida's homicide and drug OD rate first?
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Except most of the state is safe, and majority of the population is safe, just there is one major hell hole called Baltimore and that is where 90% of the homicides happen.
Yes you need to focus on the bad areas and compare those bad areas to other bad areas with the same population to get an idea of how bad those areas really are. Rather than dilute them with
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>"In fact California in general has a lower homicide rate than Florida"
While that is true, they are nearly identical. So saying "lower" isn't all that powerful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Yet the violent crime rate in CA is considerably higher than FL.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
And with a tax burden of more that double that of FL.
Re:San Fransico doesn't have slums (Score:5, Interesting)
Look at the drug overdose rates. Florida "leads" in that as well. Drug ODs should count as homicides. And suicides (another specialty of the red states) which are a failure of the state as well. Where does DeSantis get off on bashing California when his own state has worse problems with homicide, drug overdose, rape, and suicide? Actually the red states keep pushing the narrative that the blue states are full of crime yet look at which states are top in homicide rate. 7 of the top ten are red states. And of the safest .. of the top ten lowest crime rate states the top 8 are blue states. How can DeSantis say to your California, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in his own eye? He's a hypocrite, he ought to first take the plank out of his your own eye, and then he'll see clearly to remove the speck from California's eye.
As for violent crime in California, ok so people get beat up .. but at least they'd be alive unlike red states.
Vacancy Tax (Score:5, Interesting)
The obvious problem here is that buildings are primarily stores of value, like NFTs, rather than productive properties. Owners would rather stomach vacancies than admit that maybe the rental value has gone down (and thus potentially affect property value). Supply and demand is broken here.
With a steep vacancy tax, owners would actually be forced to rent out their properties at whatever rate matches demand.
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Or switch from taxing by the number of floors to a land value tax [wikipedia.org] (a.k.a. the "perfect tax") so a few vacancies on an otherwise highly productive parcel of land don't cause the land owner too much pain.
Attracting jobs back to SF as a vacancy tax would do, will just increase home prices again, which is the exact opposite of what the city needs right now in the middle of a homeless crisis.
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I'm convinced after pointing the problems with a vacancy tax (what is an illegally vacancy like withholding vs. a legal like renovation, how will it be enforced, if rent is a dollar and it isn't still rented; what then, etc.), this is less about fixing the problem than punishing evil landlords.
Nevermind LVT in concept has been around since Thomas Paine, and still gets no traction.
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Your arguments are the very same ones those "evil landlords" use to stifle any discussion of a LVT.
What's your net worth?
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Really? Please point the way to where evil landlords are arguing against LVT based upon the regulatory framework for occupancy.
You'll have to offer me at least flowers or a handjob for that kind of info.
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What does my net worth have to do with it?
Richer people know more?
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Actually, I think that Quint's point is more that unless very carefully done, a vacancy tax would be completely unopposed by "evil landlords", because as Quint kind of said, they'd just work their way around it. Instead, it'd be the small business owners, those with only 1-2 rental units, that are most likely to be hit. As is the usual way of these things, the evil landlords would just twist this to benefit them.
Unless very carefully worded, which is Quint's basic point. It wouldn't increase housing, and
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You can't fix broken cities with taxation. They need to be redesigned to work properly, delivering a good mix of affordable quality housing, retail, and business.
Unfortunately there is no way to do that without causing immense pain for current property owners. What usually happens is one of the following:
A) Nothing substantial.
B) The city dies, and those who can move to some other broken place to start the cycle again.
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FWIW SF does have a vacant storefront tax. But it's pretty limp, so it doesn't accomplish what it's supposed to do; ultimately, it only really affects the relatively small property owners. The big ones can afford to just pay the tax. Typical SF shit.
So your logic is entirely correct, they decided to spend other people's money to bolster business instead of penalizing the people keeping the units empty to the point where the vacancy tax would actually help. This rewards the biggest scum. Typical SF fail.
Is this even real? (Score:3, Insightful)
This is rearranging deck chairs. They're not addressing the actual problem, which is that people do not feel safe or comfortable. It's the crime, stupid!
Even more sad: the residential areas will almost certainly be used as low-income housing nearly immediately. Please don't misunderstand; I do not have a problem with wanting to house the poor....the issue is that if you're looking for an economic kickstart to your downtown area...well, this ain't it.
Re:Is this even real? (Score:5, Insightful)
tell me you've never been to San Francisco without saying you've never been to San Francisco.
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tell me you've never been to San Francisco without saying you've never been to San Francisco.
I live in San Francisco and I agree with him.
I also believe you live here, even are possibly originally from San Francisco, based on your god all-mighty attitude.
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I live in San Francisco and I agree with him.
Tell me you've never left San Francisco without saying you've never left San Francisco.
There's two types of ignorance: Those people who talk about a place they've never been, and those who talk about a place they've never left. Pretty much everyone considers their own city to have gone down hill. But only some of them are actually right. It's hilarious that even Fox News needs to jump over leaps of logic to paint San Francisco in bad light, ... while in the same article noting that it ranks among one of the
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That is the problem that damns many U.S. cities, not just SFO. And hence why fair but strict law enforcement is the first problem on my anti-poverty list. People won't willingly go to dangerous areas to shop, work, or build businesses. And thus those areas will continue to decay and to expand. Making them safer is a necessary first step if you want to fix this.
There will be other problems (including "gentrification" in a place where rents are already absurdly high) that will have to be addressed, and in
Re:Is this even real? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it's the poor who are homeless. One bad medical bill, or divorce, or geting laid off from work can put many people without the resources to keep up with rent. Especially in a high rent area during a time of high unemployment (yes, it's high, don't listen to the fake government numbers that don't count people who've given up on looking for work).
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It's not the poor that are homeless, it's the druggies and mentally ill.
I hear being homeless is great for mental illness. No way they could be correlated.
Needs more than a rubber stamp (Score:5, Informative)
Most office building's HVAC, electrical, plumbing and floor layouts are not easily converted into residences. Even if you gave a developer the building for free and rubber stamped all the building permits, the conversion cost may be so high that the project can't make money. It might be more feasible to tear down the office building and start fresh.
Older buildings often have lots of systems that are not up to current code. If you change an electrical panel, the inspector will usually focus on the panel that was changed and ignore everything else. Convert the whole building, and everything is going to have to be brought up to current code. I'm not from California, but I'm going to guess that an old building stripped bare might have trouble meeting the current earthquake building code during inspections.
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Most office building's HVAC, electrical, plumbing and floor layouts are not easily converted into residences.
False. Most office buildings are designed with utility access between each floor meaning that conversion of utilities is cheaper and easier than any other type of building. You're saying something is difficult while ignoring the fact that it has been happening with great success the world over. San Francisco isn't doing anything new here.
If you change an electrical panel, the inspector will usually focus on the panel that was changed and ignore everything else. Convert the whole building, and everything is going to have to be brought up to current code.
Codes haven't changed anywhere near as much as you think. In many cases nearly everything that needs to be upgraded is in the panel itself, which needs to be done anyway to
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The floor plan of office towers is an issue: people like bedrooms to have windows and code requires windowless bedrooms to have 2 doors.
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You're right about the ease of changing stuff in a building with drop ceilings. However, the water and sewer connections may well be inadequate in which case more will have to be brought in if any kind of density is to be achieved. Power might also have to be upgraded, but that's relatively easy and cheap compared to water and sewer. You don't even necessarily need to add meters, if you just divide the expected cost plus a percentage overage between the residents. You can do occasional clamps to check for p
Pointless (Score:3, Insightful)
Art shops and pop-up stores will not bring anyone into the area if it's homeless and hobo city and your chances of being robbed etc are high.
As for low-income housing - yes that will bring in the spending money of course.
They really are not living in the same universe.
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Agreed. Who wants to visit a town whose storefronts are occupied by miscreants and the behavior that goes along with them.
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yet another idiot who has never lived in San Francisco. downtown != the Tenderloin.
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I last went to Union Square two Christmases ago. Beyond the deafening hobo "band" on distorted speakers and plastic barrels as drums, there was the cackling woman who took a dump on the street as we walked by. I haven't gone back to that cesspool since.
The Embarcadero is essentially empty, just a place to walk without being on the streets.
Wherever you park, your car is going to get broken into eventually. Take BART? Pray that some nasty person doesn't get into your car and stink up the place. 50/50 cha
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and your chances of being robbed etc are high
How high are your chances of being robbed? Please provide data that includes incidents of property crimes graphed over the past 2 decades and compare it to other American cities where people are living.
I know the answer, but I want you to do your own research rather than just repeating what politicians tell you to believe.
Problem solved (Score:3, Funny)
Move to Texas. [babylonbee.com]
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Ctrl-F "crime" (Score:4, Insightful)
No results in the article.
Also nothing for ctrl-f "police".
But I'm sure that converting those office blocks (where people used to work) into apartments (for the people who no longer work there) will do the trick.
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Ctrl-F "crime" showed no results, probably because crime in San Francisco is very low compared to major cities in the USA and has fallen over the past 2 decades.
What... doesn't fit the narrative fed to you by politicians? Go look up actual numbers before you become afraid of your own shadow because someone told you to be.
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"Detroit on the Pacific" (Score:3)
We have seen doom loops before, Detroit strikes me as the best example. Now the demographics aren't the same, but the net result is likely to be similar. And that's too bad, I remember visiting SF in the '80s when it was a bit funky, but still a nice place to visit.
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The MAGA crowd and folks who don't live in or near SF don't care about the other 85% of SF that isn't having a problem. It's all a bunch of woke this or woke that comments because they have their heads up their ass. It's the same old /. crap. Not even sure why I bother to click through from my RSS feed. It's always disappointing.
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Fair enough. But it's interesting to compare city sizes. Detroit is 149 sq mi, San Francisco is 46 sq mi. So San Fran size-wise is more like 'downtown Detroit'.
I still remember driving by the ruins of Hamtramck from the airport to Warren.
Tenements? (Score:2)
I swear I remember a time when this kind of thing was considered to be a failure of past policy.
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We always hear that but why is it a failure? Lots of housing projects still are homes to people today.
Even in eastern Europe the "commie block" was actually pretty successful and people still live in them today.
Look at Manhattan for a history lesson (Score:2)
One only needs to study Manhattan's history over the past 50 years to understand why SF got this way, what to do to fix it, and what not to do to keep it that way.
"Low Income housing" (Score:2)
It really feels like this has become a nimby canard to stifle housing projects. Worry about the income level of housing is something you consider when you have enough housing, not hb you are woefully short on supply which is the core issue in these cities.
Just get more housing built, whatever can get done.
Homelessness is a separate issue with different solutions but it also will need more homes at the end of the day.
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"Homelessness is a separate issue with different solutions but it also will need more homes at the end of the day."
Except California is both building housing at a snails pace with price tags are unsustainable (over $700k per unit with some breaking $900k per unit).
Build shelter. Cheap, fast, FEMA type shelters and force people to sleep there vs. on public properties/right of ways. Also provide services.
The kink is this fanatic belief in "housing first". Basically, house folks with active substance abuse
Parking issues (Score:2)
Interesting title. (Score:2)
"'Plan To Save Downtown San Francisco From Doom Loop Approved by Lawmakers'"
My eyes caught this: "Doom loop approved by Lawmakers".
Yup. It sure was... I'm not sure any plan will save SF from their damage.
It's all about productive use of the space. (Score:3)
Office buildings were constructed with a single purpose. To support white collar desk based work. The spaces did evolve over the decades optimising the buildings to support just office work.
The optimisations meant a few things.
- Lower ceiling heights
- Utility hookups channelled to a single vertical shaft.
- Utility capacity scaled to meet the needs of white collar work. Water scaled down, electricity down, Air conditioning up.
- Parking and storage scaled way down.
- Interior walls removed
- etc
The problem is white collar work just had a jump in evolution in the last 4 years. Work from home is here to stay. This dramatic social change of course means these highly engineered office spaces are in much lower demand. No news there of course.
The problem is that these spaces are very difficult to adapt to other forms of productive work. Examples of productive work would be.
- housing
- manufacturing
- logistics
- agriculture
All of which these buildings are unlikely to support. As they are just not flexible enough to support the change.
Housing is the obvious choice. But to even support that so many things have to be done. The buildings literally have to be stripped back to the studs. Utilities have to be completely re-worked. Storage and parking have to be added. Surrounding infrastructure needs to be put in place, groceries, entertainment, medical, government services all have to be in place. Otherwise you are just building a slum. Where I live buildings are being stripped back to the iron beams and then being re-skinned for residential. It takes years. This process started before the Pandemic. As business were already migrating out of the core.
I see evidence of hollow city cores where ever I go now. SF is further along the process than most. Meaningful strategies to deal with it a few and even more rarely implemented. Or these areas will face the same fate as the old warehouse and factory areas of our major cities. These places sat vacant, crime ridden and decaying for decades. Take a look at Detroit to see a modern example of this.
As long as the city and state are only applying Band-Aid solutions the more the area will decline. Making the process of adaptation even more difficult and lengthy. Significant government investment is required to convert these spaces to accommodate new uses. Building codes need to be substantially overhauled so that buildings can be converted to other uses over time. As more changes are likely to come. Accommodation to civil services need to be in place so that they too can adapt as use cases change.
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At least for residential, lower ceilings still work. While the electricity may be less than light industrial, the prospect of having to power a cube farm of computers back in the '80s means you still need a lot of electrical.
Not sure about water. While you might not be running washing machines, dishwashers, bathtubs, and such, the water needs for a cube farm of workers just for coffee, toilets, and hand washing adds up as well.
I will agree that code needs to be updated to not necessarily be less safe, but
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Storage and parking have to be added. Surrounding infrastructure needs to be put in place, groceries, entertainment, medical, government services all have to be in place.
I know it's not the American way, but maybe consider having all of that in the very same buildings while you are doing the renovation? There's no reason for not having some of those services in the lower floors and residents on the top floors. In fact, many buildings even have separate elevator shafts for lower and upper floors.
You can perfectly have a small local DMV branch that services the neighborhood, some medical services, small groceries, pharmacy, etc. A skyscraper can pretty much become a self-s
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Storage and parking have to be added.
Why parking? People in cities have much less need for cars. I say this as someone living in a city who doesn't own a car. Bringing in more cars will create all sorts of other problems too.
Elon Musk (Score:2)
Part of the problem is jackasses like Elon Musk falsely publicizing cherry picked crime instances. SF today has less homicides than, say, 2010. San Francisco also has a lower homicide rate than most cities including right-wing run cities such as Miami. In fact California in general has a lower homicide rate than Florida in spite of Musk-endorsed governor De Santis providing us with advice on how to lower homicides and drug overdoses. Maybe Elon should ask Musk to fix Florida's homicide and drug OD rate? How
Reading these comments (Score:2, Insightful)
After reading through these comments and other stories on ./ over the years concerning California and SF I can't imagine anyone ever wanting to visit this place, let alone live there. I don't live far from Detroit. In the 80's it was still a place to visit and I attended a few downtown festivals back then. Today we all avoid it like the plaque. Corrupt city governments and failed policy is what brings down cities.
They created Disney Land for drug addicts (Score:3)
Enemy states, who want to destabilize the US, are laughing. I wonder how much Chinese money a financial audit of California law makers would uncover.
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Q? Is that you?
Right..... (Score:2)
More luxury condos for the affluent nerd caste (Score:3)
The Adtech / Social Surveillance nerds are not coming to downtown to spend their money. It's dead, accept it.
Start planning long term for affordable sustainable housing.
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We can no longer do 1970's loft conversions (Score:3)
Minimal conversions would reduce the costs and risks associated with converting office buildings, but reconfiguring fire suppression, A/C and providing more than bare bones plumbing and wiring are unavoidable costs in today's market. San Francisco should make sure that their rules do not get in the way of as minimal as possible conversions if they really want low rent conversions.
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You keep posting, but I've been to SF many times in the past several years. Sure, there are clean areas, but it's really not a pleasant place to be anymore, and anywhere the hobos go deteriorates.