Yeah, the thing I always say about the people who complain about tech workers and gentrification in a place like San Francisco is like, look, if you can't figure out how to gain from an influx of wealthy, highly-educated, low-criminality, nerdy tech workers, then that's really on you. What a gift! Any city would be lucky to have that "problem." You have to actively work to make that a negative (by, say, refusing to allow almost any new housing for literally decades).
The consequences of that decision are fairly obvious and straightforward and they've by now been explained to everybody 50 times, but this is the path these cities choose anyway! It's their choice and it's what they keep choosing.
Cities like San Francisco have said clearly, firmly, and repeatedly: "we would rather suffer a housing crisis than allow the city to change too rapidly." At this point what else can you say in response?
Maybe San Francisco is just not suitable any more? There's nothing magic about SF's geography that makes it a tech hub. It's not a mining town that needs to be next to coal or minerals, or a ski resort town that needs some mountains and snow. It's based on work that can literally be done anywhere.
Hollywood, after all, was just a dusty desert town that became the hub of the movie business because it was easier to move there and start a new one than dealing with Edison's lawyers back East, so maybe the tech industry needs to get out of SF, start a new hub somewhere else, and leave the city to the NIMBYs.
It includes two of the world's top ten universities, incredible natural beauty there and nearby, excellent weather (locals complain, as locals do, but it's wonderful), and all the resources and people are gathered there. It's hard to imagine the return on investment of moving.
Universities are institutions made of people. If SF becomes to expensive for those people to work and study in, they'll face the same problem of housing costs. And universities rise and fall over time: a great CS department one decade might slip down the ratings the next.
There are many places on Earth with nice weather and scenery (depending on taste). There are many cities with great night life for younger people, or good schools for families. None of these things are unique selling points intrinsically required for a tech hub. And if remote work becomes the norm (and yes I know all the arguments for and against) you can live in your dream town with the right mixture of scenery/weather/nightclubs/schools without paying the premium.
The one thing SF has is inertia : tech happens there because it happens there. But Detroit used to have inertia, too.
I think it's the opposite; what changes more slowly? How has the list of elite universities changed over time, unless we are talking about centuries?
> There are many cities with great night life for younger people, or good schools for families.
People like to find others with their interests. Very smart, highly educated, intellectual, creative people gather in SF, NY, LA, Boston. It's all the people who were bored and felt limited elsewhere. You want talented people to work with, to talk to, to challenge you. All those people who wanted to get out of their small town go to these places.
It’s easy to imagine it moving. The people doing the work are the ICs (individual contributors), and up until recently, SF was the only place to go to have a top notch career in tech. People sacrificed to live in SF as junior to mid level engineers because eventually they would get to the point where they are a senior engineer and make enough to afford housing. But now the housing has gotten so expensive that even the senior ICs have difficulty justifying sticking around because they are on a treadmill that takes years to save enough for a down payment (as prices keep rising). You need like $400k saved to buy in SF and you’ll still end up with a $6000/mo mortgage. You have to be a couple. Enough have figured this is a raw deal and have fled to other places like Seattle and Austin. So many in fact that you can now have just as promising a career today as someone could only get in SF 10-20 years ago. Eventually SF will find it hard to attract new ICs to the area and you’ll end up with an aging cohort of mid level managers, directors and staff level engineers that have fewer and fewer people to manage.
Companies won’t keep increasing total comp for junior engineers in SF when they can grow their offices in other cheaper cities instead.
You need a robust pipeline of junior folks and SF is increasingly strangling that pipeline and other cheaper cities are as attractive as SF once was.
It's also a place that is relatively welcoming to people from almost any part of the world. It's not perfect (no where is) but there a lot of places in the US where if you came from another continent or practiced an unusual religion you would feel more uncomfortable then you would in SF. That's a quality it has possessed for decades, for historical reasons.
I can think about Stanford as the first one... the other one is probably Berkeley. I'm quite surprised they both are in world's top ten universities - actually, skeptical about that. "Incredible natural beauty" is not only at least somewhat subjective, but definitely is not exclusive to SF. Weather is good, but even Honolulu and Miami would argue, not to mention quite a few other places, even if they are minority overall - so the weather is not that unique.
People - yes, currently the state of the people is well tuned in favor of SF (SFBA). But the question still remains.
You may even ignore this particular ranking, but it really doesn't matter, because neither Honolulu nor Miami, with all due respect, have anything close to either school, let alone both (or half a dozen of UC's in driving distance)
Also, very subjective, but I can't bear the humidity in FL and HI for more than a week, so saying it's all similarly good weather in all those places doesn't make sense to me.
But really, it's a combination of all of these things in one place.
Combination is good, agree. For separate points, the argument stands.
And the combination is likely the product of people, gradually accumulated in the area. So, yes, the intellectual potential is great. But that could be moved some hundreds miles away relatively easily, or at least replicated to a high degree - partially because of the sad situation with housing.
“Hollywood, after all, was just a dusty desert town that became the hub of the movie business because it was easier to move there and start a new one than dealing with Edison's lawyers back East…”
Yes, but also no. Keep in mind the popularity of Westerns in the 1930’s-1950’s and the ease with which you can get to desert/mountain/beach/city/forest/etc settings within a relatively short drive from L.A.
After all, the Battle of the Bulge did take place in the California desert. Medieval England looks like California, too. Even the alien worlds of Star Trek look suspiciously like California.
And when production moved to Vancouver in the 90s, you had shows like the X-Files which often seemed to take place in a vague Pacific Northwest location.
First, yes, yes there is something magic about SF's geography, it's the closest major city to the largest VC hub in the world. These companies thrive on young talent that prefers to live in a city. It's not dissimilar to the gold rush 170 years ago when you think about it.
Second, what do you mean "San Francisco is just not suitable any more"? The tech companies and their employees are the least impacted by rising housing costs. By and large they are doing alright, so what is their incentive to uproot everything and randomly go roll the dice somewhere else which would A) not have a critical mass of VC in their backyard and B) will offer no guarantee of not reacting exactly the same as SF.
Keep in mind, 20 years ago there was barely any tech in San Francisco proper. Sure there tech employees who chose to live there and suffer the commute to the peninsula, as is their prerogative being free individuals residing in the US. The reason tech moved in was because SF offered tax breaks—they wanted their piece of the tax revenue and daily spending from well-to-do tech workers. If the city really felt tech being there was the problem they have a lot of levers (eg. raise taxes, zoning changes, etc) to push it out. Of course they don't want to do that because it would cause far more economic harm than good. NIMBYs are of course willing to entertain the charade of successful tech companies as the scapegoat because it keeps their home values sky high while deflecting to the amorphous "tech companies", who in fact they have zero control over policy and at best marginal interest in addressing the issue at all.
haha fair enough, closest cute major city : ) As a longtime South Bay resident, it's super-boring down here and actually many of the same problems, expensive and lots of homeless.
But all of that is beside the point. The real interesting question is whether the companies will yank the leash Musk-style and have everyone come back here, or not. There is a lot of hype in both directions, but I'd say that debate is not settled yet.
All this talk of "just relax zoning and build housing" is so simplistic that it's actually kinda cute. As if everything else just multiplies accordingly-- streets widen, schools are built, water/power/etc just magically appear whenever residential units are simply permitted.
Just FYI, San Jose is bigger than San Francisco in terms of population and square miles.
That's not to say that SF might not be more of a major city than SJ, in fact I would say that personally I think it is in terms of culture and history and social impact, but it's at least debatable.
I think SJ vs SF distinction is not very material to this thread. The OG Silicon Valley of HP and Fairchild Semiconductor fame liked to build corporate campuses around Stanford on cheap (at the time) land. 90's Yahoo, Doubleclick, Google followed suit. In the late 2000's, a new wave of startups like Twitter figured they don't have to stick to corporate code and just move up to a more fun city up north, combined with some tax breaks from SF specifically. How does it matter? It's the same area (i drive up and down every day) with much the same problems.
Both tech and VC are vastly more mobile than anything to do with the gold rush or even other 'technology' sectors with heavy physical assets, it's purely a coordination game.
I think having both in high concentrations is mutually beneficial. The same goes for tech workers: having thousands of potential employers within commute distance without having to move is great.
That's what I meant by coordination game: it could be any place, but they should all (well, sufficiently many) be in the same place. That's why there's a lot of staying power once a place has achieved that status (fyi, in game theory that's called a correlated equilibrium [0]).
> Maybe San Francisco is just not suitable any more?
Good to keep in mind that San Francisco never was part of Silicon Valley, until this past decade where the mindshare of being SV migrated north to include SF.
Especially for a city that is explicitly progressive, why the "all rapid change is bad, it must take decades or centuries, otherwise it's not natural" approach?
Germany's large cities have similar issues where they don't want to start building new districts because it'd be artificial and not naturally grown building by building. And it's better to have rents double every 10 years, apparently.
I don't get the "why", but the approach is fairly explicit -- and politicians get reelected while following it, so I guess it's what "the people" want.
Quickly throwing up cheap mass housing without also organically growing the services and rest of the community is how you get food deserts and ghettos though. I'm not saying it shouldn't be done, just pointing out where it's gone wrong in the past and why people may be hesitant to try again.
"Food deserts and ghettos" are also the outcome of broader housing scarcity and lack of amenities. Where the only cheap areas around are those that have become cheap merely by virtue of being terrible to live in, and are since stuck in that vicious cycle.
It doesn't have to be "plan & build it within 12 months, and don't worry about anything but apartment buildings". It's not a new problem, it's been a constant topic (here, in Germany) for at least 15 years, with every year ending with "we have 2000 new apartments, but we need 20000 a year to keep up with demand". And city planners put their hands into their pockets and say "well, you can't rush these things..."
What will come first: commercial cold fusion energy or a return to actually building housing in Western cities?
A very practical reason: most of that available space is a desert, and people tend to prefer not living in a desert.
And also because European nations are much more developed, have much stronger economies, allow much more freedom etc etc. There's a reason why migration is a one-way-street.
People have been living around Cairo for millions of years. There are reasons why migration is a one-way street but they can change. There are millions of under-utilized young adults with access to the internet. They will find a way to prosper.
Egypt's natural environment cannot really support strong further growth. If they invest heavily into solar energy and desalination, I'm sure they can create more arable land, but it'll still come at very high capital expenditure compared to other locations.
What's your prediction here, Egypt, Morocco and Algeria overtaking Germany, France and Italy with regards to economy, science etc (broadly "development") and drawing migration from Europe? In what time frame, by 2050?
2050 is possible. There is no need for arable land if food is imported. People will want to live where the nicer weather is. Adjusted by air conditioning from cheap electricity, the advantage is in North Africa.
It's not inevitable, but when the competition is cold fusion and building housing in Western cities, I would bet on North Africa.
*edit:
>>>living around Cairo for ~millions~ thousands of years
Here in Korea quick building of mass housing is incredibly common yet there's not a single food desert or ghetto to be found. "Quick" and "cheap" are relative terms but here apartment blocks of 1k+ residencies are built in ~4 years. While most aren't "cheap" as they're built for families, those for 1 or 2-person households are very cheap by e.g. Western-European capital standards.
>Quickly throwing up cheap mass housing without also organically growing the services and rest of the community is how you get food deserts and ghettos though.
Not sure if this is the case overseas, but here in Melbourne (AU), it's really common for new developments in built-up areas to consist of a shopping centre with supermarket on the bottom floor, and a large amount of (nice) apartments on top.
Seems like a good way to solve the density problem without also isolating people from shops and services.
Food deserts are not the result of theft. Food deserts exist outside of SF or other cities that are accused of being so soft on crime and all crime is legal. Food deserts are incredibly common in rural areas, especially as a result of their non-density. But hell, when I lived in Jacksonville( which is a consolidated city-county) I was 10+ miles from any grocery store. North side has developed a lot since I left and that is no longer true but in many rural areas the only places opening up are dollar generals which are taking advantage of the economics of whatever local grocery store is charging and offering an alternative to driving 30+ miles to the nearest Walmart. A sad state of affairs.
I live in Pacific County WA and it is an economically depressed area with an outsized cost of living. Groceries are absurdly expensive relative to the average income in the area and you could probably get the same groceries for half th price by driving to where the closest Walmart is( which is 30 or so miles from where I live.
This is a popular trope, but companies have already begun walking back their claims of rampant theft[0].
There are increased profits when building in more prosperous areas, so one might understand why companies choose to do so given limited resources. But lower profits in inner cities are not always about theft so much as a lack of cash.
The article doesn't support your claim. What it supports is the idea that for Walgreens as a whole, shrinkage isn't a make-or-break issue. It says nothing about whether Walgreens will choose to place or keep a store at a high-theft location or whether a mom-and-pop store can survive in the same.
The grocery business is famous for having very thin margins, so anything that cuts in will necessarily cause fewer options for the people of that area. Academic studies have generally shown that this is in fact not a trope but fact.
That isn't what the article says. It says Walgreens is walking back their anti-theft measures because it's costly and ineffective and the customers don't like them.
It also says that they sounded the alarm when shrink was at 3.5%, but they're back down to the more-normal 2.5% now. That's a decline that undercuts the very-popular trope that open theft is rampant or out of control in certain cites.
> I don't get the "why", but the approach is fairly explicit -- and politicians get reelected while following it, so I guess it's what "the people" want.
Consider every time you have moved into a new place to live. What kind of research did you do and what factors did you consider when prioritizing multiple option down to the final selection?
It's possible you might say (since I don't know you) that you only look at price per square foot and do a sort based on that and take the cheapest option and that's that.
Most people don't do that though. They consider the neighborhood as a whole, nearby facilities, the character of the location (e.g. lots of 24hr pubs or quiet tree-lined street, etc). So the surroundings matter a whole lot to a lot of people. So people don't often want to go through the whole process of researching, selecting a place and moving to it, just to have the whole neighborhood torn down and redone in a different way a few months later. Might be better, but it's still different, so it doesn't check the same boxes they so painstakingly researched before moving.
So when you say you don't get the "why", it's just human nature. A lot of people want to settle into a stable-ish home, where things around it change slowly, not at a hectic pace that makes it seem not-home anymore.
I understand the individual's reason why they don't want a high-rise in their backyard. But having a new development 3km down the road really doesn't affect your home.
But in cities with lower ownership percentage, everybody is feeling the heat when you just cannot afford to move if you're not a top earner because your current flat would cost twice as much since you moved in ten years ago. Rent as a percentage of income steadily rises, 30% was the maximum recommended value, which is now considered good, 50% is now accepted. Germany has relatively low incomes and high taxes, people are clearly feeling it.
Yet still, they re-elect politicians who block large-scale developments in open areas. I've lived in Hamburg, they have plenty of space that can be easily developed and integrated into the public transportation network, but they don't. They wouldn't even need to build it themselves, they'd just need to allow private investors or housing coops to build. But they don't, because ... I don't know. Change is bad? It's too good of a topic to bemoan and win elections with, because people are too simple to see that they've been running the government for 50 of the past 55 years? Landlords paying them off? I don't know.
Almost no one in power in the USA is actually low taxes and low spending. Maybe a few libertarians scattered throughout the country that managed to get a seat but they're a very small minority.
Everyone is all about high taxes and high spending. It's just "high taxes for thee but not for me". So, for instance, republicans will repeal taxes on the rich and large corporations even when we already tax the middle class W2 earners more than the rich already. Similarly, republicans are huge for the MIC. So much for being fiscally conservative when they want to spend literally hundreds of billions of dollars on a stupid boondoggle airplane that no one gives a shit about.
Democrats have the same issues. They also have a hardon for the MIC and spending on stupid shit. The dems in SF will spend it on stupid trashcans or whatever nonsense that doesn't move the bar at all.
They will tax the hell out of the working class and spend the money on shit that doesn't improve the material conditions of everyday people. It's why we can't have healthcare. Both parties have no interest because that doesn't make their lobbyists money.
Given that Wyoming makes up around 0.2% of the US population, I guess the original claim that "almost[!] no one in power in the USA is actually low taxes and low spending" might be pretty reasonable.
I didn't want the tech workers flowing into Seattle with Amazon's decision to invade by building their HQ right in the heart. There was a lot of music culture there, at Cap Hill, in the basements of Seattle families that had lived there a long time. It really felt, if you were there, like an invasion: nobody coming in had any context of what was already there, they just took and took and all they could offer was software expertise and money. The city lapped it up.
Sometimes it isn't about just building to accomodating: it's about hey we don't know who you are, you just heard our city was the place to be but you didn't care about the music or the art just came in clueless.
We're not good stewards of the places we move to. We move in and pillage. Our lives are code and Zoom stand-ups, which fine whatever but what are you bringing in outside your code and Nanoleaf wall lights that give you just enough design to be tech-hip. We're raiders, trading our money for jacked up bulletproof lattes and a scene that doesn't belong to us, nodding along to punk music that's not for us, not about us except as the enemy.
Honestly, the best thing Microsoft did was have their own little stronghold out in Redmond. Amazon upended that careful respect-at-a-distance by landing their dumb super-HQ like an atomic bomb in downtown Seattle.
When a company creates a new HQ, it's displacement. When a company leaves a town (especially a small one) it leaves people jobless and they are evil for it. On the surface it seems some people think cities should stay entirely static forever, frozen at the particular time when they remembered they enjoyed it most.
The people moving in will have their own experiences. Places change. If you don't like your place, work to make it better or find one you like more. Maybe not everyone in your city is into the arts and "scene" as much as you are, and the changes are a net benefit to them.
> On the surface it seems some people think cities should stay entirely static forever, frozen at the particular time when they remembered they enjoyed it most.
I didn't say this.
> The people moving in will have their own experiences. Places change. If you don't like your place, work to make it better or find one you like more. Maybe not everyone in your city is into the arts and "scene" as much as you are, and the changes are a net benefit to them.
The tech people moving in make no effort to learn what the city is about or to integrate. That's really what I'm taking a stand on. They use money in lieu of real effort. That's pillaging.
The root of the problem is big corporations aren't held responsible for the seismic shockwaves they produce entering a city. They make cities fragile because now you've replaced a diverse set of businesses with a monocropping of tech workers and overpriced goods and services to sate them.
> It really felt, if you were there, like an invasion: nobody coming in had any context of what was already there, they just took and took and all they could offer was software expertise and money. The city lapped it up.
Story as old as time. There were people 30 years ago who wanted to keep out the people you're celebrating as the old-timers. If the older-old timers had their way your preferred old-timers would never have been allowed to move there. And there were even older-than-the-older-old timers who wanted to keep out the older-old-timers. And on and on and on.
Cities change. It's natural. You'll like some changes and hate others, but that's what comes with freedom of movement and, well, freedom more generally. At one time Midtown Manhattan was a forest. Then it was farmland. Then a semi-rural village. Eventually, rich New Yorkers started building Mansions up 5th Avenue. But they did this in the old days before powerful people could block change and even they couldn't stop the walk-ups that replaced their estates. Then those walk-ups were mostly lost to taller buildings. And then even taller ones. And now here come the super-tall skinnies that every New Yorker loves to hate.
At every step there were constituencies opposed to the changes, people who thought the newcomers didn't properly understand the true spirit of Midtown Manhattan. And maybe they were right. But on it goes.
As much as you might not like the changes, the alternatives are far worse. Internal migration controls? Way worse. Refusing to build any new housing to spite the newcomers? Just ends up hurting everyone.
You want to live in Seattle and so do lots of other people. And in a free country their claim on the city is equal to yours. They are full citizens the day they move in. They don't have to pass any kind of Authentic Seattleite test. Because what it means to be an Authentic Seattleite will change, too. That's just life in a free society.
The displacement is real, Ballard used to be mostly Boeing employees, but your not going to be buying there with Boeing's pay and stability problems today.
Visiting Georgetown is a glimpse into the Seattle of 20 years ago IMO. It has it's charm.
Amazon is definitely a turn and burn, threadbare employer that doesn't understand how to value talent and internal resources they develop. Low and mid-level employees are like chewing gum to them, lasting a year or two before Amazon spits them out.
Many of their workers embrace this mentality, making decisions based around their ephemeral stay in Seattle that normal Seattleites find off-putting.
> the people who complain about tech workers and gentrification in a place like San Francisco
The people who are complaining about this are not the same people who are restricting housing access.
A similar dynamic happens in Boston, where people are resentful of gentrifiers, and I can't blame them. They're not the ones voting to block housing, it's the already rich people in the area who do that.
> The people who are complaining about this are not the same people who are restricting housing access.
The majority of them think that YIMBY is useless or counterproductive because only luxury apartments are being built. There have even been protests against this [1]. The main problem is that most housing advocacy is focused on taxing tech workers and using that to subsidize rents, which of course does nothing for housing costs, but does help landlords.
Yes, they are. What do you think "anti-gentrification activism" boils down to, in practice? Build more and drive prices down? Of course not, the activists will conveniently tell you that this makes gentrification worse! Which totally defies economic logic: there's only so much demand in the world for places like Manhattan!
> Which totally defies economic logic: there's only so much demand in the world for places like Manhattan!
How much demand "in the world" to live in Manhattan do you think there is?
The more the price drops, of course, the demand will go up. So how much "in the world" at both current prices and also if, say, prices went down by 5%? 10%? 50%? 75%? I think there's enough currently-unmet demand to keep the prices from falling far even if you add supply.
(You can also increase demand by building. This is the goal of every property developer ever, after all. To make it worth more than it was when they found it.)
Who knows? Pretty easily 40 million like Tokyo has, and that would already be more than double the current population. Possibly much more.
There are a lot of people held back by nothing but cost, so dropping prices would increase demand. There are also people held back by other factors, but some of those would also likely be relieved by building more housing.
Think about it - that works just as well if you take it to the extreme as "rebuild the entire city denser" - once you knock down the entire city, that land is gonna be worth a lot less.
And the demolition approach has the advantage of costing less than rebuilding everything after you demo it!
It's also a good way to force demand to move around, right?! Hell, if you demolished Manhattan and everyone there moved to other cities in the US, I wonder if the average rent and/or mortgage payments of the displaced people would go down...
> Hell, if you demolished Manhattan and everyone there moved to other cities in the US, I wonder if the average rent and/or mortgage payments of the displaced people would go down...
Is that a rhetorical question?
You've asked the wrong question. It should be whether the sum that everyone in the world spends on housing will increase or decrease, not only the displaced Manhattanites.
The effective demand for places like Manhattan comes from the highly productive economic activity that can be pursued in such places. So if the demand for places like Manhattan (or Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai etc.) really was that boundless, that would be plenty of reason to build as many of them as possible and speed towards that post-scarcity techno-utopia.
(But the ghost cities of China actually show how this can go wrong. So, as it turns out, you can only YIMBY so much.)
I don't think the demand is literally boundless, but I think the idea that we could easily outpace demand with construction to dramatically increase affordability is wildly optimistic.
I'd rather build new Dallases, or denser Dallases, than try to double the density of Manhattan, because it will both be easier to find/acquire un-utilized land to use, and because the amount of work required to double the density of Manhattan is much more intense, construction-wise.
Of course density should be pursued wherever it's cheapest to do so. The point of thinking about the Manhattan case is that this is the natural endpoint of any sort of "more housing and higher density always leads to higher prices" argument. It clarifies to what extent that argument can possibly work, as a matter of basic logic.
As far as I can tell, the Manhattan case tells us that we aren't even close to the "building more will cause prices to fall" point anywhere in the US. And because of that, building more where it's cheaper is a better strategy for controlling costs than building more where it's already expensive.
Manhattan was brought up to mock the idea that construction could make prices worse for existing residents, I don't think it shows that at all.
Is it any wonder that "you're dumb, building more will lower prices" hasn't been a persuasive argument to people who've seen construction push up prices around them for decades without the promised lowering of prices yet? That's just asking for a leap of faith that this time will be different, we'll hit the magic tipping point, without any actual evidence for that.
> Is it any wonder that "you're dumb, building more will lower prices" hasn't been a persuasive argument to people who've seen construction push up prices around them for decades without the promised lowering of prices yet?
You're making an assertion about causality that often gets thrown out, but typically without being backed up.
Certainly construction often correlates with prices rising. However, the arrow of causation could run in either direction. It's possible that construction itself increases demand in the area enough to raise prices. However, it's also possible that increased demand (due to agglomeration effects, etc) raises prices and results in construction to meet that demand, which lowers prices in the area relative to what they would have been without the construction.
This doesn't necessarily mean that construction will lower housing prices, but it does mean that without it prices will be even higher, because the construction is attempting to meet new demand that's already there regardless.
"Expensive" city centers in the U.S. have comparable density to bog-standard suburban towns in the rest of the developed world. By all indications, we're nowhere near the "tipping point" where trying to increase density there would physically be so costly as to be unsustainable. That's something NYC can perhaps legitimately worry about, but I'm not sure how that could apply to other high-demand places in the U.S.
The tipping point of concern for the anti-gentrification crowd isn't "is it profitable to upzone", it's "will upzoning make things cheaper" and those are VERY different questions.
But just going on the numbers for the former question, the "expensive" city centers in the US generally start with Manhattan, Brooklyn, SF, and whatever you'd call "center" of LA. And they don't seem that far behind a lot of the rest of the developed world...
Manhattan is >70k/sqmile.
Brooklyn is 37k/sqmile.
SF is ~19k/sqmile.
LA is 8k/sqmile.
So what are the "bog-standard suburban towns" you think they're comparable to?
I can't think of many, and my searching isn't turning many up. Milan appears to be 20k/sqmile while Rome is 6k/sqmile. And those aren't "bog standard suburbs" like a Marietta, Georgia; those are central cities! Let's go bigger and even more central - London is 15k/sqmile, Paris is 53k/sqmile. Tokyo is ~17k (and larger, more like a double-size LA, there), but not overall denser than the US's expensive city centers. Manchester, in the UK, is 5450/sqmile. Stuttgart is 7,800/sqmile.
Manchester is apparently comparable to San Jose! So again, seems like the way to fix is it to focus on the places further down the list, like an Austin, TX, at 3k/sqmile.
> the ghost cities of China actually show how this can go wrong
Except most of them filled up and now it's just another one of these Chinese misconceptions in the west that of course isn't newsworthy to clarify. Pudong was a prominent example a decade ago and is now a thriving financial hub.
Very much a case of build it and they will come, whereas us in the west seem to require significant undersupply and rampant social problems before we even talk about building housing or infrastructure to meet basic needs.
There's nothing wrong at all with overbuilding.
> any developments initially criticized as ghost cities did materialize into economically vibrant areas when given enough time to develop, such as Pudong, Zhujiang New Town, Zhengdong New Area, Tianducheng and malls such as the Golden Resources Mall and South China Mall.[16] While many developments failed to live up to initial lofty promises, most of them eventually became occupied when given enough time.[7][17]
> Reporting in a 2018, Shepard revisited a number of the so called "ghost cities" several years his book and noted that, "Today, China’s so-called ghost cities that were so prevalently showcased in 2013 and 2014 are no longer global intrigues. They have filled up to the point of being functioning, normal cities ...
People are of two minds: on the one hand they complain of "middle class flight" decimating the tax base. on the other hand they complain when the middle class "gentrify" a neighborhood.
The Mission is probably a decent example. It used to be more or less like Noe Valley many decades back. Then people moved out and was settled by people looking for affordability --then decades later, as housing in Noe Valley etc., was exhausted the Mission was "gentrified" in a slow cycle and people again complain.
They don't. But getting people to understand supply and demand is hard. Getting them to blame visible changes in the neighborhood (e.g. fancy new apartment buildings going up) is easy.
People who live in rent-controlled apartments seem to be against gentrification, as they end up losing their rent-controlled apartments for new construction.
> if you can't figure out how to gain from an influx of wealthy, highly-educated, low-criminality, nerdy tech workers, then that's really on you
Oh, people are gaining from them. It's just that the people gaining are generally the people who already have political power.
Someone who owns their home doesn't mind seeing land values quadruple, thanks to this influx of free tech money.
Someone who is renting, so that they can save up money for a downpayment, whose service industry wages have not quadrupled in that period of time minds very, very much.
I can't imagine any place will be much of a 'joy' to live in, if there's no barista's, waiters, etc who can afford to live within a 2 hour radius.
I mean, if you want a 'servant' class, then you need to at least make it worth their while and ability to thrive. Everyone wants to be able to go to Olive Garden, or McDonald's but there won't be these places if people can't afford to live there.
There will always be lesser jobs, but not if nobody can live for the wage given to them. The only answer is more housing, and/or higher wages. Probably both, but esp more housing.
It’s really the opposite, they wanted to gain too much from it.
If your city wants to keep it’s style of residential density, fine, limit commercial growth, stop adding jobs to the city if you won’t add housing to match it. And that would be fine, plenty of other places would benefit from spreading the tech wealth around.
> if you can't figure out how to gain from an influx of wealthy, highly-educated, low-criminality, nerdy tech workers, then that's really on you. What a gift!
Those tech workers, once they move, are not customers, they are the city. It's their city as much as anyone's, any failures or successes are theirs; what have they done?
Recent arrivals pay the lion’s share of property taxes thanks to Prop 13. Income tax on tech wages and stocks gave California its budget surplus in recent years. Political advocacy is a bit more limited, but you have to keep in mind that tech is heavily foreign born. I’m the only one of my work friends who can vote.
New arrivals to a city, no matter their socioeconomic status, in the aggregate, have less influence than folks who are long established in the city. It's a human thing.
The consequences of that decision are fairly obvious and straightforward and they've by now been explained to everybody 50 times, but this is the path these cities choose anyway! It's their choice and it's what they keep choosing.
Cities like San Francisco have said clearly, firmly, and repeatedly: "we would rather suffer a housing crisis than allow the city to change too rapidly." At this point what else can you say in response?