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Say, as long as I’m chuckling:
San Francisco’s best days were the tech boom, you say?
You understand what subjective opinions are?
In my [subjective] opinion, San Francisco’s best days were during the mid-late 60s.
Haight-Ashbury days.
That was before my time, but the people that experienced it seem like pretty cool people. However, I know they hate Asbury spiraled downwards from all the drug use after a few years. It was probably the beginning of that era that was the sweet spot.
For me, it was the '90s, we were just out of high school and experiencing the city while it was still full of interesting people, plus we were big foodies before that became a thing, and in those days, we could actually save up to eat at some of the best restaurants in the city, which were very interesting and Chef driven. Nowadays, meals like that are like $400 a person before wine. Even though we can afford it more easily today, it's just not worth it to us anymore at those prices.
The hippies in the Haight treated me with love … free love, free weed, free acid, . Lots of all of it. Great times.
I don’t give a fig about ideologies, liberal or conservative. Ideologies are just poor excuses for lazy intellects.
The world we are *enjoying* is an illusion … a house of cards. Utter b*** s***. Homo sapiens lived and thrived for hundreds of thousands of years without any of this crap we now consider necessary de rigueur.
Well to each his own. The thought of lots of free drugs and random sex holds zero appeal to me. We're all different. I also find the tech bro culture super annoying. What I need is a dog, the company of my spouse, some delicious food, a cup of coffee, and a guitar. The one material possession I do treasure is our home. We spend a ton of time at home, so we skimped on everything else to afford the nicest home we could, and we bought it at the tail end of the last big recession. Now we are sitting on quite a nice bit of equity, but our day to day is pretty simple. Everyone has their individual preferences for everything!
I'm not interested in people just hating on SF. If you just want to snipe then please go elsewhere. I've been concerned for a number of years, before the pandemic even, about the issues SF faces. Every city has problems, but it felt like the tech boom breed complacency. IMO, the number one issue SF (and the broader Bay Area) faces is an acute shortage of affordable housing. Homelessness is likely a result of lack of affordable housing. Onerous permitting and planning has tied the city in knots, both preventing new housing but also stifling businesses. Crime is also an issue, though I think this is often overstated, and there's a separate SF crime thread, so maybe leave that to its own thread.
I'd like to see more urgency among elected leaders in re-imagining what the city can be. Clearly, just hoping for a return to the pre-pandemic tech boom is wishful thinking. It ain't happening. At least, not without a lot of very intentional (and perhaps even undesirable) incentives to lure companies and their workers back to in-person offices.
This seems like a great opportunity to make SF more inclusive, more socioeconomically diverse. Convert office buildings to mixed used residential-retail. Make a lot of these small, efficiency apartments that are affordable by design. Make some loft/art studio units, would be great if artists could afford the city again. Convert some of the space to shelters and transitional housing.
While the challenges facing SF seem large and foreboding, I'm optimistic that this could end up being good for the city. It could increase economic diversity away from homogenized tech culture, with more folks thriving other than tech bros in Patagonia vests. But I think this will require courage for a new vision of the future along with a willingness to embrace change.
Oh, and BART... the political will likely doesn't exist in Washington to bail out BART if it comes to that. The state needs to be ready to step in. I get that CA is facing budget woes at the moment, so if the money can be found elsewhere then maybe it's time to pause spending on the High Speed Rail and redirect those monies to local transit agencies. It just seems odd to prioritize a speculative new system connecting two smaller cities in the Central Valley while established transit systems that are (in comparison) highly used go to waste.
I agree with what you're saying. The high-speed rail seems like such an odd project to invest in, in a relatively underpopulated area. I just don't see the ridership. That money would be much better for regional Transit. It's good to see that BART is investing in more security and policing so that riders feel secure.
As people said, converting office space to residential can be very difficult because of the construction method and floor plates. In particular, nobody wants windowless homes, so the units would have to be very deep to go from center lobbies all the way to the edge. A very tricky thing indeed. We live in San diego, our downtown office Market is not that big, as most of the tech and biotech located in hubs north of there. Meanwhile, downtown built dozens and dozens of residential high-rises, so while we had wished for more office back in the day, now we realize that the residential was a good move in hindsight.
SF has room for affordable housing, including what you refer to as built-in affordability by virtue of size and amenities. I would love to see more of that mix. You really can't ever go wrong with housing.
I also wonder about commercial rent control as a way to maintain the viability of small businesses. We talk so much about the cost of residential real estate but very little about the cost of commercial real estate. As rents go up, people look to all the businesses to pay their employees more, but when landlords are jacking up their rents, they get squeezed too, and the ones who are actually raking it in are the landlords. It makes it hard for both people to live and people to run businesses. And nothing is worse than only big, bland real estate offices or banks in our neighborhood districts.
Why we no longer live in the bay area, we spent many years on and off there during the past 30 years. In the last couple of years, we even spent a month each summer in the City. There was definitely a shift, but there were still lots of great things about it, and some neighborhoods were much less affected than others.
Pivoting and repositioning is a natural part of life, whether it's for people or cities, and San Francisco is the queen of changing identities, from the gold rush to the Victorian era, from beatniks to hippies to yuppies to artists to hipsters to tech Bros. One thing about San Francisco is that it's always been in flux and never constant.
I agree with what you're saying. The high-speed rail seems like such an odd project to invest in, in a relatively underpopulated area. I just don't see the ridership. That money would be much better for regional Transit. It's good to see that BART is investing in more security and policing so that riders feel secure.
As people said, converting office space to residential can be very difficult because of the construction method and floor plates. In particular, nobody wants windowless homes, so the units would have to be very deep to go from center lobbies all the way to the edge. A very tricky thing indeed. We live in San diego, our downtown office Market is not that big, as most of the tech and biotech located in hubs north of there. Meanwhile, downtown built dozens and dozens of residential high-rises, so while we had wished for more office back in the day, now we realize that the residential was a good move in hindsight.
SF has room for affordable housing, including what you refer to as built-in affordability by virtue of size and amenities. I would love to see more of that mix. You really can't ever go wrong with housing.
I also wonder about commercial rent control as a way to maintain the viability of small businesses. We talk so much about the cost of residential real estate but very little about the cost of commercial real estate. As rents go up, people look to all the businesses to pay their employees more, but when landlords are jacking up their rents, they get squeezed too, and the ones who are actually raking it in are the landlords. It makes it hard for both people to live and people to run businesses. And nothing is worse than only big, bland real estate offices or banks in our neighborhood districts.
Why we no longer live in the bay area, we spent many years on and off there during the past 30 years. In the last couple of years, we even spent a month each summer in the City. There was definitely a shift, but there were still lots of great things about it, and some neighborhoods were much less affected than others.
Pivoting and repositioning is a natural part of life, whether it's for people or cities, and San Francisco is the queen of changing identities, from the gold rush to the Victorian era, from beatniks to hippies to yuppies to artists to hipsters to tech Bros. One thing about San Francisco is that it's always been in flux and never constant.
Agreed, office conversion is difficult for the reasons you mention. One idea: Obviously, put bathrooms in the interior, but also make big windowless areas into storage and utility rooms. Who wouldn't want a city apartment with plenty of storage space for bikes, skis, or even a small workshop?
Rent control is usually where I break ranks with YIMBYs. I try to follow the science, and the consensus view among economists is that rent control reduces the quality and quantity of rentals long-term. That said, I'm not a purist so this isn't a hill I'm willing to die on. If some form of reasonable commercial rent control was necessary to prevent displacement and give voters the courage to try other changes then I'd be for it.
Like you, I have fond memories of SF from the '90s and early aughts, before the tech bros homogenized the city. I was in tech, so I'm not anti-tech (well, except that I'm highly skeptical of big tech's naive myth of progress), but just wish the region adapted better to the influx of high paying jobs. First and foremost, for the sake of people who were unfortunately displaced, but also because the rapid decline in diversity made the area much less interesting.
So I'm hopeful that SF can recapture some of its former self. But I do worry how much a "doom loop" has to spiral before bold changes are made. Will the bureaucracy relent and actually allow change? I hope so, and soon. And I suspect the state will need to step in at some point to prop up BART and other regional transportation agencies.
Well to each his own. The thought of lots of free drugs and random sex holds zero appeal to me. We're all different. I also find the tech bro culture super annoying. What I need is a dog, the company of my spouse, some delicious food, a cup of coffee, and a guitar. The one material possession I do treasure is our home. We spend a ton of time at home, so we skimped on everything else to afford the nicest home we could, and we bought it at the tail end of the last big recession. Now we are sitting on quite a nice bit of equity, but our day to day is pretty simple. Everyone has their individual preferences for everything!
Ah, to an upper mid-western teen just returned from a combat tour (I was still 18 when I got back from first tour) it was all quite the bizarre circus … couldn’t have been more of a dichotomy in life. Dazzling. Distracting. Suspiciously delightful. The ‘consciousness expanding’ drugs were actually very effective in my case to form mystical perspectives useful in compartmentalizating my war experiences. While for some the psychedelics blew brain circuits, many others gained insights.
As for the free love? By the time I returned from my second tour, age 20, I was involved in a love affair that brought three children and lasted 30 years until she passed away in my arms. I met her in Haight-Ashbury. She was also from Minnesota, experiencing the flower-power revolution
Next relationship lasted 22 years until she also passed away as I cared for her through another long illness.
But those couple San Francisco Haight-Ashbury years were deeply formative. I treasure the memories.
Oh gee an op-ed from that famous media site "the San Francisco Standard". Sounds real credible. How long did you have to search for that one (as I'm sure this is daily reading for you). Hyperbole is fun. No agenda here
Oh gee an op-ed from that famous media site "the San Francisco Standard". Sounds real credible. How long did you have to search for that one (as I'm sure this is daily reading for you). Hyperbole is fun. No agenda here
I read a lot of facts by different people. What about that article screamed op/Ed to you?
I read a lot of facts by different people. What about that article screamed op/Ed to you?
The article is laced with opinions. Did you read it?
And not one of them have a crystal ball. Kind of reminds me of the gloom and doom comments from many financial advisors calling for the end of the U.S during the recession of 2008. These guys are wrong more than they are right (but you only hear them go back on a prediction when it's right...the other 9 out of 10 times when they were wrong, you hear nothing about it).
And then there's this...
The San Francisco Standard is an online news organization based in San Francisco, California. It was funded in part by the billionaire venture capitalist Michael Moritz. In May 2022, the Standard published a story showing that Boudin's office secured three convictions for drug dealing in 2021. The story was criticized by Matt Charnock of The Bold Italic for allegedly misrepresenting facts and contributing to xenophobic rhetoric.
Ironically, the original name for the publication was "here/say media"
But I'm sure there's no bias here Finper.
Me thinks he tries to hard (especially when you're pulling obscure publications like this)
Last edited by blameyourself; 04-06-2023 at 05:39 AM..
I like to read around and get perspectives from lots of different angles. You should try it. Oftentimes you'll find that one side of the ideological spectrum ignores or downplays important issues that you'll miss if you're only ever reading news from sites that confirm your own biases.
Here are some other sources covering the same topic:
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. Lots of all of it. Great times. 
