My wife's grandmother is a CA NIMBY. Prop 13 and all.
She just wants things to continue how they are. Paying taxes on her 1970s property value, living in the same place, etc.
I'm pro-YIMBY but I can't say I don't see the NIMBY's point. If you're some average Joe who moved into Cupertino, and now some crazy number of people commute to work through your neighborhood, and you're going to get high-rises everywhere, and the prices of everything around you (groceries, restaurants, gas, etc) will skyrocket, you might not want it.
At bottom I view all of this as a tug-of-war between the whole tech employment system and CA's political environment. Overall I'm pro-YIMBY but you do have to admit the absurdity of trying to cram ever more people into smaller and smaller space when the work is perhaps the easiest to do remotely that there ever was. It all seems sort of silly.
LA/OC and SF are global mega-cities full of people who seem to want to live in small towns in the country, yet choose to live in global mega-cities. It's weird.
It's not weird. SF wasn't a "global mega city" until perhaps the late 90s (it's honestly pretty debatable that it is one today).
If you purchased property in a quaint, romantic seaside town in 1980, and starting in 2012 the global tech industry decided it wanted to make that small town into New York, why wouldn't you oppose it? I'm not saying I agree, but the motivation is perfectly rational.
Honestly, the only irrational thing here is the desire of the global tech industry to cram itself in a 50-square mile patch of land on a peninsula in the Pacific ocean when it could go literally anywhere in the world.
Hmm... yes I can see that perspective from long-time residents.
Thing is I grew up in the Midwest in the 90s-2000s and SF always felt like a global mega-city in my mind up there with New York and London. That's how I always pictured it mentally even though I knew it wasn't as big. I was just so influenced by the culture it had exported since the 60s counterculture all the way up through 80s-90s hacker/tech culture, etc.
Socioeconomically it's a city that is (was?) poised to become an "alpha global city," but it's possible that the NIMBY-driven excessive and premature housing cost explosion has destroyed that. I already feel like a lot of what made SF great has been driven away. I don't live there, which in a way might make my view more objective. The city no longer seems to be the beacon of culture or intellect that it once was. Maybe for the NIMBYs that was the goal, but in keeping the city the way it was physically they might have succeeded in destroying the way it was socially.
I live in SoCal now and like it down here too. I strongly support action on the housing crisis to prevent SF's real estate hyperinflation cancer from spreading down here. It already has to some extent, but San Angeles (what I call LA/OC/Riverside/SanDiego) has what may be a non-metastatic non-terminal case that could still be treated with a dose of chemo.
I don't actually oppose development (in SF, or California at large). I just hate the hypocrisy and callous, self-interested rhetoric around this subject, and don't believe construction will be effective at lowering prices on timescales meaningful to any of us. SF will have to continue building through at least a few more boom/bust cycles for that to happen.
"Socioeconomically it's a city that is (was?) poised to become an "alpha global city," but it's possible that the NIMBY-driven excessive and premature housing cost explosion has destroyed that. I already feel like a lot of what made SF great has been driven away."
I completely sympathize, but here's the thing: now that I've lived in a number of different cities, it's become obvious to me just how comically limited San Francisco actually is. If you go to London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Paris...you see these massive, sprawling cities with incredible transit systems and infrastructure. SF is a dinky little geographical backwater. It's landlocked (i.e. "supply limited"), with terrible transit and worse traffic. It's not a place that wants to be a global mega city, nor could it be one if it wanted to be.
I firmly believe that the real solution to the acute housing crisis in SF is other half of the demand equation: eventually, the tech industry is going to come to its senses and begin relocating. It has to happen.
Apple's going to be here for a while, they can afford the salaries people are demanding to be here.
The trend is already clear and accelerating for smaller firms. No startups can afford to hire here on a 500k seed. You'd be paying 200k/head all-in, you can't even run a 4-person company 18 months on that.
The bigcos will be slow and conservative like they are with everything. But change is already very obviously underway.
Yeah. I think you and I pretty much completely agree.
Like, I'm probably pro-development on balance, but it seems like a pretty two-sided issue to me. You can look at all the money the companies bring in, the tax revenue, the good jobs, but there are also 50 or 100 or whatever thousand people commuting to work every day. I don't think any town could manage that level of growth well without becoming a completely different place, and not what its residents signed up for. Then layer on all the knock-on effects, like escalating property taxes, overcrowding of schools, huge and growing demand for living spaces, escalating traffic everywhere, and a one-company monoculture overtaking your town, where every birthday party and backyard barbecue is going to turn into talking about work, and it doesn't seem like a great deal.
I think the tech industry is completely stupid to put up with this. It concentrates all the prosperity in one place, forces huge inflation due to contention for everything, and it all ultimately cascades to huge wage inflation.
I am so impressed by Amazon's HQ2 plan. They seem to be the one company willing to do what others aren't because it makes sense.
The top five US public companies are Apple, Google, facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon. Three of them are HQ'd here. Netflix isn't top-5 by market cap but I wouldn't be surprised if it gets there before long, maybe displacing Microsoft.
You can certainly make that argument but it's on a whole different level now. Apple is earning 60-80 billion in profit per quarter. Many of the companies you list don't even have market caps that high.
She just wants things to continue how they are. Paying taxes on her 1970s property value, living in the same place, etc.
I'm pro-YIMBY but I can't say I don't see the NIMBY's point. If you're some average Joe who moved into Cupertino, and now some crazy number of people commute to work through your neighborhood, and you're going to get high-rises everywhere, and the prices of everything around you (groceries, restaurants, gas, etc) will skyrocket, you might not want it.
At bottom I view all of this as a tug-of-war between the whole tech employment system and CA's political environment. Overall I'm pro-YIMBY but you do have to admit the absurdity of trying to cram ever more people into smaller and smaller space when the work is perhaps the easiest to do remotely that there ever was. It all seems sort of silly.