Wow! I had been to a few of the offices in the place mentioned in the article and in 2018 I had to visit the home (a Villa inside APR) of a potential big customer. As I drove in with my co-founder through the checks and meandered toward the Villa, the first thing that escaped from my lips were, “Did we just landed somewhere in California?” It looked extremely close to the place of my long-time late business partner's home in South Pasadena -- kid's bike on the patio, manicured lawns, garages with seagull cars parked.
Of course, there are the usual well-boxed apartment complex within the massive compound but these Villas are the epitome of a self-contained bubble in Bangalore. The entrance to the place from the main road is even not easy to navigate for first-timers.
However, the biggest dread now in Bangalore is stepping out of our home or the complexes. Many of the roads remind me of final destination every time I drove out.
Disclosure: I'm also hiding in another community where my neighbors are the founders, and similar suites in many Indian Startups, including quite a few expats transplanted by Indian Company acquisitions of International Companies. And yes, the Third Wave co-founder is one and I got his home-made coffee during the Pandemic delivered at my doorstep (cool guy). Also, I find that the term "Third-Wave Coffee" and "Peak Bengaluru" always tend to go hand-in-hand. ;-)
Bengaluru’s unlivability is entirely due to the failure of the public administration and widespread corruption.
There is no public transport. The metro that was supposed to be completed years ago is in a perpetual state of delay. The roads are always dug up for some random construction project that never gets done on time.
The airport is a source of woe for everyone since its at least an hour away from all offices and residential areas. The only reason it was made so far from the main city is because politicians owned a lot of land in that area and wanted to appreciate its value.
Bengaluru will continue to remain unlivable because India’s educated technocrat class is too tiny to have any real say in the state or even the city’s politics.
At least the weather is nice and crime isn’t all that bad. Delhi can’t even boast of that.
>>Bengaluru’s unlivability is entirely due to the failure of the public administration and widespread corruption.
As somebody whose several generations have lived in Bangalore. What you wrote could be true.
But Bangalore's current state is also due to the city growing by 100% every 5 years since the 90s.
To give you an indication as a kid in 90s, Ulsoor lake was our outskirts picnic destination. Peenya was a far industrial town outside Bangalore. Most places like Sarjapur and even Yelahanka were like very far villages outside Bangalore.
There's only that much you can build when you grow so far.
BMTC says hello.
I live in South Bengaluru, near nice road and Hosur road...
I get a bus to majestic every 5 minutes all hours of the day, and am air-conditioned bus every 15 minutes or so.
Fair enough.
I too long for the day the metro crosses jaydeva hospital...
The folks at BMRCL are building a 5 layer system there (1 underpass, 1 flyover, 1 street level, 2 levels of metro as there is a changeover at jaydeva).
The fun part is that the part of the line after silk board (down south, towards hosur) is done, and is billed to start operations this year.
> We (the Indian technocrat cohort) need to get into politics
This could be lifted out of Plato's Republic and it would be exactly as relevant.
But the counter-point is that politicians run very close to their electorate's ideas (or selectorate's) - most politicians are not stupid people, so when you see them pushing stupid ideas, it is their commentary on the audience they are pandering to.
I met Sam Pitroda in the late 90s. His commentary on C-DOT was a complete wet blanket on my theories of how the world is changing through technology.
The theory is sort of the opposite of a "resource curse" - a "human resource curse" if you will. If what you end up exporting are humans, not things you dig out of the ground.
Hello @mindtropy. I read your comment under an other post. You talked about having worked in embedded industry in last 16yrs and how you used to enjoy working on electronics earlier but don't care as much these days. Can we email? My address is in the bio.
Civil services, even state civil services were designed from the perspective that they would defacto govern the country. Which is actually a fact. No politician can hold a candle to civil services cadre in a country like India. Even before India got independence, the fact that most of India was unlettered and even with a democracy cannot make informed decisions was fairly obvious.
This is apart from the fact that most elected representatives themselves cannot read/write, and even if they can they have little idea about how to run things. Even the good ones take a while to get a hang of things, and are not really trained to make policy decisions. Given most elected representatives are also more like 1 - 2 term politicians, they also can't think long term or anything beyond roads and drinking water.
When you have a set up like this you need a dedicated cadre of life long administrators who can defacto govern the country. For all practical purposes civil services are ruling elite of India. They are also treated as such. The only real problem is the process of selection is made to select trivia scholars and people with a knack for theatricality than real competence. There is also an assumption that people who make it after such a process will be competent life long. Both the process and assumptions are wrong.
The sheer small size(4500 people) of civil services cadres, far reaching powers, lack of accountability, assumption of static/growing competence, there is no concept of continuous learning or training. This creates a problem of scarcity. By that comes privilege, corruption, autocratic behaviour etc. Eventually these are like mini rulers of India.
This is a big reason why even in corporate sectors everybody wants to be managers, there is an assumption that these management/administration jobs have no work, and unlimited power and perks.
India's culture makes it look like a failure to work regular engineering jobs where you build things, take a salary and go home.
You can put all the investment in the world, but you cannot take the mindset of corruption from Indians. Given a chance, on average, they will take the easy way out. The biggest curse of India was Infosys and the "IT boom" which brought in thousands of low level jobs to India, bolstered the economy but killed any innovation in the country. All the thinking and innovation was done in the west and cheap bodies were provided by India. That's why Java was so popular in India. It allows for very little creativity. Leaving India's reputation as a place for cheap, dumb labour with low quality code or scammers. Only recently a tiny subset are trying to break out of this mold.
>>However, the biggest dread now in Bangalore is stepping out of our home or the complexes.
Don't wish to make presumption, but please if you stay in those gated communities, I have to say you know nothing about Bangalore. That entire Whitefield/ORR crowd lives in a tailored bubble, everything from their home to kids schooling is kind of tailored to make them comfortable in a cocoon which doesn't apply nearly all of Bangalore.
The article drags in Sunnyvale, where I live, but can’t really find one negative thing to say about it. The population reduction is purely related to COVID WFH leading some people to work from elsewhere, and is temporary. It’s a very nice place to live. Low crime, good schools, great weather, plenty of jobs. Very liveable.
This lazy tendency to lump SF in with Silicon Valley is dumb. SF is a peninsula, it’s not in the valley. It has a few niche companies but the huge bulk of the tech industry is down in the valley, which does not have SFs problems.
High cost of living, the most exciting thing happening in town is the farmer's market, good schools doesn't apply to all of Sunnyvale, lack of diversity, everything that's moderately interesting is closing down (we lost weird stuff warehouse, fry's, etc.), the list goes on and on.
It's liveable if one's idea of living is going to their tech job and maybe hiking on the weekends, but otherwise it's really boring.
The big thing recently was the Obon Festival in San Jose Japantown, we had a great time. The valley is very Asian, if you don't make any asian friends you are missing out.
The fact you say "lack of diversity" when many parts of the south bay are more than 50% Asian, makes you sound like the kind of racist who just does not see Asian people. Similarly, San Jose is 40% Hispanic and it's a big part of the culture down here.
It's the same lack of diversity as mining towns. Where are the people who are not working in the tech industry? Where are the people building cool arts projects?
The lack of diversity refers to the fact that way too much of the people in this area are just worker drones that go to the corporate campus to work, eat at the corporate cafeteria, commute back home, and don't interact much with the community.
The people not working in the tech industry are everywhere, you just ignore them, then pretend they don't exist. The cool arts projects are things like the iPhone, and Google search, and Photoshop. Where do you think those things were invented?
Cupertino, Mountain view, and San Jose, none of which are Sunnyvale. Also, you're kind of proving my point if your "arts projects" are stuff that comes out of large corporations.
It's very driveable, traffic is fine and parking is easy. Neighborhoods like downtown Mtn View and downtown Sunnyvale (where I live) are very walkable but you don't have to walk.
Public transport is not the way to go in the valley, but if you do use it it's much safer than public transport in SF.
[..]Mohandas Pai, the former Infosys director and poster boy of Bengaluru’s tech boom, feels the rot runs deep. “There’s a high degree of corruption in every wing: roads, governance and garbage,” Pai tells The Intersection. “The government collects taxes from urban areas, but invests them in rural regions.” He nevertheless thinks the city’s un-livability is an exaggeration.
Mohandas Pai, the former Infosys director and poster boy of Bengaluru’s tech boom, feels the rot runs deep. “There’s a high degree of corruption in every wing: roads, governance and garbage,” Pai tells The Intersection. “The government collects taxes from urban areas, but invests them in rural regions.” He nevertheless thinks the city’s un-livability is an exaggeration. [..]
He hit the nail on the head. This is exactly the same with Bay Area governance. No local govt..everything is regionally governed and distributed statewide.
is there such thing as peak "unliveability". where a place becomes a hellish nightmare for all but the 1%.
or does the gap get wider forever and we are heading toward some kind of real dystopia.
i mean what eventually happens to over-saturated markets, be it housing, jobs or whatever else. when demand vs supply reaches peak disequilibrium (cant think of a better word..)
>As a conch family, with generations buried in the local graveyard and my whole life here, we have to leave kw. There’s no potential for security anymore. The only other average conchs my age I know who are planning to stay have housing assistance. They can only stay because of govt assistance that I’ll never qualify for. And the number of homes available to people with housing assistance is very limited. The only others I know that can stay are inheritors. Kids who’s parents owned nice homes or businesses on Duval etc and they were blessed with the hand me downs.
>Thing is we have way too many tourists on average here now and nobody will be here to serve them. And beyond the frivolous ways of serving them, (drinks, food and clean rooms) what of the safety and community? Nurses, teachers, cops.. None of them qualify for the affordable housing income restrictions. They never fit the bracket, but they barely make enough to pay market rents. Without a properly staffed hospital, how is it safe to host thousands of tourists?
We always say “well now who’s going to clean your rooms??” as if only housecleaning are being run out of town. But no, it’s the entire foundation of what makes a city run, and it’s crumbling, rapidly.
> Thing is we have way too many tourists on average here now and nobody will be here to serve them
One thing I've been pondering lately is why we had such a spike in tourism. I think the usual economic variables come into play but social media (especially Instagram) takes much of the blame in my mind.
The problem I see is popularity gets clustered into several locations based on what is popular. So a place that looks pretty on Instagram and gets tons of likes and shares gets overrun with tourist, whereas an equally beautiful place gets zero attention because it didn't get massive attention on social media.
I live in Colorado and we have a bunch of "outdoor influencers" here and many of the locations they have recommended have become overrun with tourists and locals alike. It's gotten to the point where I will browse their IG profiles to see where not to go.
> One thing I've been pondering lately is why we had such a spike in tourism.
A lot of it is likely a spike in tourism in general. There are plenty of affluent young people and air travel is cheaper than ever, so it isn't usual for people in my social circle to take 2 big trips and 4-8 smaller trips a year. To my Dad, the idea of travelling across a continent for a weekend is nuts (and he was also among the affluent young growing up). For me, that's a perfectly normal thing to casually do.
For him, the thing was road trips, so he was limited to a certain geographic area. With air travel, weekends are only limited to North America with a bit of the East off the table because of the messy connections required to get there from Western Canada.
He went camping to the local park and went to museums a few hours away. I visit museums thousands of Km away instead.
Has this ever happened? I have heard this prediction about everything from Toronto to New York to Los Angeles to Hong Kong for years and it has never seemed to come true.
There are people willing to make extreme sacrifices to live in certain places. People will live 5 to a room in cockroach infested 100 year old apartments to stay in certain places.
In Toronto, labour is no more expensive to purchase than the rest of Canada (minimum wage laws aside). Toronto is worth it to enough people to have a bunk in a bunk bed over a room to oneself while working in fast food.
People can also commute. Vancouver is notorious for having teachers commute from Abbotsford. In Toronto, people will commute 2.5 hours each way from Barrie or London.
A lot just may be that the older people get replaced with less resource intensive young people who don't have kids, need less medical care, and are happier in less space.
The downvotes on this comment are odious and don't help : downvote comments that are not well-written, not merely because you disagree with the content.
Not yet to my knowledge. This is new territory which is why you have theses claims being unfulfilled.
I expect we’ll see it in a smallish community like key west first where bussing in service people will become impossible. But maybe they’ll start building employee dorms and bus people in for their shifts (x days on, y days off). Who knows.
No one knows where the breaking point is, only that there is one.
Employee dorms are a real thing here in North America.
After college I had a friend working at in the town of Lake Louise Alberta. This is located in a national park and the number of homes are extremely limited and very expensive.
Visiting my friend they game me the tour of the house. It was a three bedroom 2 bath townhouse with 15 people living in it. 4 beds per room upstairs, and 3 people in the basement.
All the people worked at various retail shops in the village. (Not at the chateau) Making minimum wage.
You can't purchase a home in Banff National Park (which includes the towns of Banff and Lake Louise) without having an active or planned business set to open in the town, having some other blood relation to someone living in the town, or having lived in the park since 1981.
This is a special situation. They are specifically trying to limit the supply of housing in Banff to limit the environmental impact.
I don't understand why this is downvoted. I, too, have heard this and what happens is wages rise and people make do. It doesn't actually end up that folks are no longer there.
I would expect to easily find occupation data at census tract level but no luck. Should help easily verify if this is happening.
I believe it. I am sad about. It is a form of cultural destruction.
My very poorly founded opinion is that Travelvlogs, Airbnb, TripAdvisor, and similar attacks on the obscurity of such locations coupled with the permissive treatment of housing as markets for out-of-region investment have erased livability almost everywhere.
Tropical resorts and beaches likely can be build to service enough of them. Ofc, they will be very manufactured, but I think they could be viable. Just already look to some destinations like Canary Islands. Where most of build area is some type of resort... Building areas for pure tourism might be wasteful, but might also be least bad option in general.
Speaking of disequilibrium, this is almost the same question that is plaguing the American Southwest regarding water. Is there a point that Las Vegas becomes unlivable? Is it when the lake runs dry? Is it when water has to be pipelined from desalination plants? Is it when water costs more than oil? In my opinion there is a fail point here; however, many in the 1% do not believe it’s will happen. The perpetual growth train is still on the tracks and steaming away.
This is an interesting question, one I've pondered for a while.
This is speculation, but here's what I believe:
Let's assume wealth follows a Pareto distribution, with the single parameter alpha determining the shape of that curve, and thus the resulting income inequality.
I think that growth of real economic output / GDP probably has a maximum for some alpha, above which, increased inequality slows down growth. I suspect it also declines BELOW a certain alpha since it offers fewer people with extreme capital to the market capable of making moonshots.
However, that doesn't mean growth stops, and I suspect the people high on the curve have little incentive to change. I'm not sure though. Is it better to have ownership of X percent of wealth, and greater relative wealth, or X-e percent of wealth, less relative wealth but more growth?
Now... ostensibly, I don't think there's likely to be a 'peak'. It would defy the assumptions of a market. If housing prices rise so high there aren't enough buyers, prices would fall. However... famously, certain billionaires have been known to buy up all the houses around theirs at exorbitant prices to enhance privacy. So I suppose you could still see vacant housing, but no fall in prices.
That said, in general, quality of life would decline for lots of people. We'd see a lot more roommates and extended family groups living together to make it affordable. People in US cities used to do that a lot actually, and we might see a return to that.
There has historically been a floor though, where below that, things are so bad that people don't have much to lose by taking up arms, dragging rich people into the street and cutting their heads off.
Another angle in modern times is that we are seeing such a precipitous drop in birth rates in the West, that I suspect we'll start to see countries compete for people interested in having children by creating financial incentives and friendlier conditions to do so.
I suspect that beyond a certain point on the wealth curve your wealth or growth of that wealth stops mattering to you. I’m sure their are those who continue working at it as it makes them feel valued- but it’s difficult to spend more than a few million dollars a year without being frivolous to the point of stupidity.
Which means you’ll have a lot of unmotivated money, or money that’s only interested in preserving a relative position on the economic latter - far from the meritocratic capitalist dream.
The worst it can get is people starving to death, which has happened several times even since the agricultural revolution thanks to political decisions.
I don’t really expect the situation to get that bad in this case, however.
“Sunnyvale is an apt name for a city in the heart of Silicon Valley, at the southern end of the San Francisco Bay Area, where the sky is always blue and largely cloudless. The burgeoning population of Indian techies has earned the city its new moniker ‘Sooraj Nagari’, much the way neighbouring Mountain View—home to Google’s global headquarters—goes by the name ‘Pahar Ganj’.”
Also, uh what? The 1960s were dominated by hippies, which are more like Luddites outside of drug use, if you consider LSD “technology”. The 1950s and the early Space Age much more align with a tech utopian vision
“Silicon Valley owes its ideals of technological utopianism to the culture of the 1960s–a heady belief that tech is inherently a force for good in the world. “
What is early, and who besides Steve Jobs (who I would not consider an early silicon valley pioneer anyway) fits that mold? Most were straight-laced tie-wearing scientist-engineer types until the dotcom era.
Ummm, while not 'Silicon Valley' the Santa Cruz tech scene from the 70s until the early 2000s very much looked like this. Maybe not the big guys, but the hundreds of 10-150 people shops trying to make a more technological world for sure. All the industry events I went to over the hill seemed fairly well representative of this as well. It had a lot more hardware elements so a ton of super hippie stoner hardware technicians that don't seem to be part of the current monoculture there. Larger name examples being Borland, Seagate, EMU, SCO.
And ties? Jean/dress shirt in the 70, polo shirt khakis 80-early 2000s was 'formal'. I never saw anyone wearing ties other than visiting sale people or visiting 'money guys' pre 2000s, not even our AIX repair guys. Not like the people when I go back to the Bay Area now, where even their 'casual' dress scream of financial excess.
To me this is how the system is supposed to work. I mean, people moved to LA after WW2 because it had jobs, cheap real estate and nice weather.
It doesn't have cheap real estate or great paying jobs (relatively speaking to COL) any more.
Detroit's populations was doubling every decade from 1900 to WW2. Go and visit some time and see the opulent housing downtown. It was the place to be in America.
Now it's a lot of abandoned houses.
I'm not sure why our goal should be "create cheap housing in the Bay Area". The problem will take care of itself as people move elsewhere (it's already happening) and business cycles remove a lot of easy money.
We don't really have to do anything. It's a problem that will solve itself.
The (elected) Indian city council member of my Bay Area City took others to Bangalore for a show and tell using tax dollars. This trip was later used to defend the high density housing plans. And then there was another trip to Shanghai. (None to Singapore interestingly where high density actually works because the govt is efficient and provides state housing to more than 70% of pop).
It was appalling for all immigrants who did come from their over populated high density failed urban centers. In the end, more housing. But our PD has been slashed(more crime now), road diet(more cycle lanes but traffic jams), over crowded schools, higher water and power bills(14hour power disruption yesterday in adjacent neighborhood…
Looks like there is a toxic exchange of energy between two corrupt govts that are learning from each other after burping all the tax dollars from the burgeoning tech sector. They have effectively made the tech sector as the villain so the people can fight amongst each other while they can march towards their higher political goals. Many city officials have gone on to state senate.
The elected official who organized the Bangalore trip was picked up by one of the FAANG’s billion dollar affordable housing initiatives after their term was over. Hmmm…this feels familiar. Where have I seen this before I moved to the Bay Area?
Americans are prone to "projection," not learning, but using their closest experiences to explain new things, even when most obvious rational explanation stands against it. "Everything must be like in America."
I have tons of Indian friends, and spent months on assignments in South Asia.
There is absolutely no contest to the idea that IT been overwhelmingly, massively beneficial for South India, far exceeding all maladies. Anybody coming with an idea like "lets bulldoze Bengaluru because hipsters say so," or punitively tax IT will be skinned alive there.
Anti-development agenda does resonate within the country at all sans few communist holdout areas. It is universally outside party discourse, nationalists are for the IT, congress are for IT, even communists are for IT lately, and whomever says otherwise will be voted out faster that you can blink.
Similarly, people pooing on manufacturing relocating to South Asia have zero idea how damn glad people are for new factories coming there. Valley hipsters coming to "save oppressed workers" are surprised when the same workers, and union leaders come to violently lash out at them.
Bringing outside money into somewhat impoverished area is massively beneficial for it area. It might have some negative externalities. But on average it is likely to improve everyone's living conditions. Economic activity is what drives development. Give it a few decades and the once expensive will be affordable for average people.
On other hand overheating a existing developed market might not be so great for anyone but early investors moving out from the market.
Putting my “Game Theory” hat and “Systems Thinking” hat.
Given the “Law of Induced Demand”, can anyone here explain to me why cheap housing is possible?
I would think that all these systems (as in, systems thinking) are functioning the way it supposed to be.
Overpopulation will eventually result in population decline. Because it is too expensive, not enough space/resource, everyone wants the same location, jobs, etc. System oscillates.
You're treating this as a system which changes states instantly. It does not. You can progressively build housing and expand a city such that you can keep prices stable, at least in theory, and 'affordable' (not a well defined word). In that sense 'overpopulation' is a deficient state which would not exist if not for heavy intervention against the natural response which would be to build at, more or less, the rate at which new residents are wanting to come. I'm not sure if there's a known limit to this, although I admit populations might oscillate a bit if SF with 100 million people is too unpleasant...
That's not to say it's always bad to keep prices higher. Basic regulations do that (e.g. safety) and place a floor on the extent to which housing can truly be affordable without governments just forcing rent control and denying others the chance to live in a particular place entirely.
Because SV and Vancouver housing shortage is exacerbated by NIMBY zoning crap restricted by politics outside of your so-called capitalistic forces.
Even if the system works as you say it would, is the outrageous human cost it entails just a detail for you? We are not trading transistors or currency notes, we are trading people. “Pricing a demographic out” means dislocating vulnerable families again and again as they desperately try to sustain and make an honest living. If we can devise a better system than this abattoir you describe, we owe it to any existing conscience to try and implement it.
It’s only natural to feel like the system is working because you’ve been successful. It takes a better person than natural to think beyond how things have worked for them and try to think of the whole system and it’s participants.
I still gave my answer nonetheless. Capitalism and related “systems” don’t always (or ever?) work perfectly in human society. Because human nature is unnatural, driven by greed/emotions and illogical. See this great article explaining it in an engineering company sense: https://danluu.com/nothing-works/
A better system would be to create incentives for economic growth in other areas rather than trying to cram ever increasing numbers into a few limited existing urban areas.
> housing shortage is exacerbated by NIMBY zoning crap restricted by politics outside of your so-called capitalistic forces.
I mean, there is a cultural aspect to it. I remember a few of my white American friends being shocked at the idea of raising kids in a condo, because « having a house and a yard » is the only way to have kids. Those people, I’m sure, will turn into nimbys in the future because « this housing is not for us ».
There is definitely a cultural gap here. Most immigrants value stable housing they can own and like minded community. Diversity occurs between different communities and not expected between every individual we interact with..
Social status is important. This is the Old World. Most immigrants start out as stateless or on uncertain visas with far away homes. The psychological need to own a home where it is your castle is very deep. Immigrants are almost always NIMBYs in America.
I have examined the reasons why I am a NIMBY. And I am ok with it. Moving to another country and culture for economic reasons is rewarding on one hand but requires painful sacrifices.
I have tried to explain this to Americans and those who didn’t have to leave their home countries and rebuild their identity and lives…some say they understand, but most don’t get it.
That’s ok. There is nothing wrong with being YIMBY or NIMBY. Market forces will decide. I have also observed that most self declared YIMBYs become NIMBYs when they sign their first 30 year mortgage. The weight of a mortgage is heavy. Home ownership is not for everyone and it’s not a walk in the park. Those who willingly bear it will hedge their bets and fight for their investment. This is normal.
The problem is that due to regulatory capture, it won’t be the free market that decides. House building is a highly regulated activity, so the deck is stacked against the YIMBYs. Hence the political fights to change laws to make the system a more fair than it is currently.
The issue with NIMBYism is it often builds structures around itself to insulate from change in the practices (local government incentives). Only top down mandates can break the cycle, but places like the US are not socialist enough to do that.
Incidentally all my immigrant friends and relatives who do NIMBY arguments also vote republican and supported Trump. For what it’s worth.
At the end of the day, we elect politicians based on which areas of our daily lives we want to be screwed over..it seems like... There are no winners amongst the voting, tax paying public.
Vancouver has built tower after tower after tower, it's not recognizable from 25 years go. Also - it's not the responsibility of local residents to demolish their homes and move into flats 'so you can live there'. The NIMBYism argument is rubbish as you have no right to influence or dictate the terms by which some other community wants to live.
If people want to live in homes instead of jammed into skyscrapers Hong Kong pr NY style - which many would view as a horribly reduced quality of living - it's their choice.
NY, HK - two of the most densely urban place in he world have not solved the 'housing crisis' - they're among the most expensive places in the world to live.
That said, cost of living has skyrocketed far beyond what can be attributed to that - fairly high migration, a lot of foreign buyers (only 4% directly, but 'kids with citizenship using parents money' amounts to a big other cohort) and that is very easily enough to drive prices. Combined with low interest rates, an aging population with incredible voting power/influence, a booming economy and there you have it.
'Globalization' means SF and Van. basically are 'up for grabs' by everyone on the planet, not just locals.
1/2 of the real estate in the most posh parts of London are owned by foreigners for he very same reason.
There needs to be a total rethink on how taxation works in those parameters.
That said, it's rational: if a lot of talent wants in, prices will be higher. I don't know if 'artists' are going to be able to live there without some kind of very specific interventions.
Other things, such as public transport can have a huge effect - if SF Bay were to be amalgamated into at least some kind of 'mega city' you might see high speed commuter trains.
Imagine a very fast train from Stockton, Pleasanton, Gilroy, Santa Rosa - getting you to 'wherever' in the Bay area within 25 minutes?
There's tons of real estate around the Bay Area, for artists, working class, middle class, regular folks, people who want 'big houses' etc.. it just not 'accessible' to the core.
Or even micro/satellite offices as a civic mandate: building out offices that can be adjusted in size quickly, so that Salesforce, FB, Snap etc. will all have offices in San Jose, SF, Sacramento and bounce back and forth as needed.
The government fails in its mission if it lets a handful of people hold the most valuable land hostage. At least Nimbys should pay much higher property taxes to make up for the economic damage they cause the rest of the country, so they can live in a single family home next to a major city downtown.
Free up zoning, get rid lopsided tax breaks like prop 13. Or end up with a revolution like in France in 1700s. Or lose to China.
I painted with some broad strokes here, but the picture is clear.
"The government fails in its mission if it lets a handful of people hold the most valuable land hostage."
? This is upside down.
It's only valuable because you want it. It's not 'intrinsically valuable'.
The great thing about America as opposed to most parts of the world is that there is plenty of land.
Go 100Km out of SF Bay and land is very cheap.
'Life Liberty and Pursuit of Hapniness' means a bunch of angry people cannot arbitrarily force you out of your home, because they want to 'move in'.
If this were a perverse issue of resource hoarding - i.e. everyone in SF was living on 30 acres of land and not willing to budge, then this would be a different discussion.
The 'American Dream' is not the right to live in the most choice plot in the US, it's just to have a nice spot, safe, secure etc..
If SF/Valley is where the jobs are, and you can't afford to live there - that's very fair. Push the companies to get some kind of good transport in place. Or adapt in some other way.
The American Dream is not when some NIMBY tells me I can't bulldoze my SFH to put up a six story apartment building.
Your framing of this issue is frankly ridiculous - it's SF homeowners vs other residents and property owners in SF who would like to densify their land.
It's not about people's right to live anywhere, it's about people's right to do as they wish with their property.
The issue is your defining the community arbitrarily to be people in some city limit. Others including myself are defining community to be the homeless, workers who would like to be residents, but live outside the city limit, and employers who probably want more workers in commuting distance.
Unfortunately, there is only one San Francisco peninsula with cold air from the Pacific and warm air from the desert. I think the California legislature should over rule the city to deal with the homeless crisis and cost of living crisis. The Nimbys in San Francisco, like other cities, have no skin in the game to fix that problem as they benefit enormously from the crisis they make much worse.
We're not talking about skyscrapers, which have serious infrastructure requirements and need to be planned.
We're talking about low-rise apartment buildings.
Perhaps if I rephrased your statement as "If the community doesn't want poor people and minorities - you can't have poor people and minorities" you'd better understand why this is a morally bankrupt argument. Given the price of housing, it's effectively the same thing.
Vancouver has crazy low property tax which explains the rampant speculation and unaffordability. And capital gains - without limit - aren't taxed for primary residences.
I think you just used a few hundred words to still spell out “not in my backyard.”
I’ve lived in NY. Many of my friends are people who moved from SF to NY. The housing in ny is much better than SF. For the same rent you get a place with 3x better commute, and 100x less syringes and feces. This is just for the skilled workers. Even a commute from Staten Island is nothing compared to the horrendous commuting conditions I’ve heard from some of the less fortunate folks still trying to make it in the Bay Area.
All because a bunch of rich privileged people keep insisting some grass in front of their house will make them happy and nothing else will so screw everyone else.
This is brutally selfish populism, totally lacking self awareness.
It's none of your business what other people want to do within their communities, and it's ridiculous that you think you have the right to tell them - but worse - to disparage and gaslight others for not wanting to change their lives dramatically to suit your little agenda and lifestyle choices?
Of course - SF vs. NY is mostly a matter of choice.
From my purview - NY is a giant pile of hot concrete and garbage, I would never live there for any reason. It's laughable that anyone would contemplate spending such vast sums to live in a 'tiny box' even for a shorter 'shorter commute'. But that's just me.
In my (previous) years of living in SF, I've never come across a 'syringe' or 'shit' - moreover, that's entirely a function of civic break down and kind of besides the point - it's another, separate issue.
SF is otherwise a lovely city that I have no interest in living in anymore, but if they don't want to build skyscrapers it's entirely their prerogative.
I probably could not afford to live there now, much like I can't afford to live many places, that's just reality. Other, richer people want to live there. Oh well. There are innumerable nice places where I, and others, can live and be just as prosperous.
I think the point is that this possibly doesn't really matter and there is no level of building that will keep up. It's cheaper to move to SF than it is to build a house in SF and always will be. Allowing more housing won't help until you get to an very massive number of units as you'll simply have even more people moving in which will fuel the crisis even more until construction cannot keep up. Worse construction prices will skyrocket which will impact anyone wanting to do any renovation or maintenance (including existing landlords) which will drive rents up even more.
> It's cheaper to move to [city] than it is to build a house in SF and always will be.
This is exactly it. Further, attempts to preserve the current population size of a city and keep things the same as they are can only try to deprive newcomers of the infrastructure needed to support themselves (housing, transit, etc.), but not actually make it illegal for people to move in. And quite clearly, they will move in anyway. Even cities that try to adapt can only grow so quickly, as it takes time to build new infrastructure, but new arrivals can come at any time.
In some ways I expect this problem will get worse, as the population of people who are decoupled from a particular location increases. “Work from home” is nearly the same thing as “work from anywhere”, and I expect that a lot of people will want their “anywhere” to be the currently trendy locale, and will throng from place to place.
Some Americans are certainly comfortable living in such situations (there’s no shortage of people creatively making it work in Manhattan, for instance, and tiny homes have a following and even TV shows)
You mean the problems are with people who bought their homes because of XYZ, which you now want to change out from under them, even though a PROMISE was made to those people by the Government in the form of the zoning rules in place. But rules that destroy what made a person's MOST VALUABLE asset VALUABLE to them shouldn't matter if that gets in the way of what YOU WANT, right? Their entire lives should be able to be disrupted, they should be forced from their home, because you no longer want to keep the promise made when they invested THEIR ENTIRE LIFE into their home. You want to move in and change the rules, just like the guy who guy who buys the house next to the airport then tries to get the airport shut down. You do know that you can, like, move to Manhattan, right?
Sorry the little people are getting in the way of this great leap forward you wish to make at their expense.
EDIT: Anyone who wants to force high density housing on others should ONLY be allowed to take vacations on community loving cruise ships. I mean, there is no valid reason to not want to vacation on cruise ships, and by putting all vacationers together it improves efficient, maximizes space, and reduced impact, right? That is the only acceptable vacation.
All of these rules were put into place in the later half of the 20th century. This is a really recent development in the country’s history.
These high density areas, and even many low density areas, have a housing shortage. A lot of the current inflation is being driven by rent. Now grown ups cannot buy homes in communities they’ve grown up in. Is the alternative supposed to be abandoning social networks or living in the streets?
I'm afraid it's slightly different. Many Americans are not comfortable with fellow Americans living that way near them. They have a strong in-group bias. You'll see that in the surveys about "want to live near people like me".
It's why SF has transplant as a pejorative. Personally, I am comfortable living around people not like me or who have chosen a different path. And I think there are many Americans who do and that the thrust of progress here comes from those people: the ones who are comfortable with change.
People don't like high density because it sucks. I want a yard, not a tragedy of the commons communal space. I want to be able to remodel without having to get a commities approval. I want to have lavender flowers in my garden because they remind me of my mom. I want to sit on my porch and drink coffee in peace, not have communal tables. I don't want to come home and not deal with vomit in my entry way/elevator. I don't want an HOA/COOP Board gatekeeping and policing me.
People don't leave college and move into dorms of 'in-groups' that meet their bias.
Do you make up in your head your partners movitions, frustrations, wants in your head too? Or do you just dehumanize motivations for people who don't hold your 'correct' opinion?
EDIT: Anyone who wants to force high density housing on others should ONLY be allowed to take vacations on community loving cruise ships. I mean, there is no valid reason to not want to vacation on cruise ships, and by putting all vacationers together it improves efficient, maximizes space, and reduced impact, right? That is the only acceptable vacation. There can be no valid reason to not require all vacations be via cruise ship.
Cheap housing is either substandard (see the phrase "Tofu dreg project" used in China [0]), or located in places that aren't very attractive (you can buy a whole house in a semi-abandoned Italian village for 1 euro [1]), or available during a certain time-limited period when some place started to grow rapidly (say, the Silicon Valley in the early 1980s), but not everyone realized it yet, so there is a window of opportunity there. People who bought property in San Francisco of the 19th century definitely bought them cheaply.
The answer, I think, is that given sufficient numbers sheer volumes can provide counteracting political power to rich minorities and their vassals.
So cheap housing will arrive when those who do not benefit from economic rent seeking or exceptions to having rent extracted from them outnumber the rest.
With high population growth, I think that's possible. It's also possible with economic collapse but I think the Bay Area is here to stay.
Places have subcultures and SF's tech subculture is novelty. Even startup culture in NYC is mostly about industrializing the process of copying novelty: mostly the China approach.
Of course, there are the usual well-boxed apartment complex within the massive compound but these Villas are the epitome of a self-contained bubble in Bangalore. The entrance to the place from the main road is even not easy to navigate for first-timers.
However, the biggest dread now in Bangalore is stepping out of our home or the complexes. Many of the roads remind me of final destination every time I drove out.
Disclosure: I'm also hiding in another community where my neighbors are the founders, and similar suites in many Indian Startups, including quite a few expats transplanted by Indian Company acquisitions of International Companies. And yes, the Third Wave co-founder is one and I got his home-made coffee during the Pandemic delivered at my doorstep (cool guy). Also, I find that the term "Third-Wave Coffee" and "Peak Bengaluru" always tend to go hand-in-hand. ;-)