A (mostly) Fair Reading of Why it is so Expensive to Live in the Bay Area

If you’re wondering why people are protesting you, how we got to this housing crisis, why rent control exists or why tech is even shifting to San Francisco in the first place, this is meant to provide some common points of understanding.

This is a complex problem, and I’m not going to distill it into young, rich tech douchebags-versus-helpless old ladies facing eviction. There are many other places where you can read that story.

It does us all no justice.

How Burrowing Owls Lead To Vomiting Anarchists (Or SF’s Housing Crisis Explained). No: it isn’t just the fault of the tech world, but a combination of a highly-restricted housing supply, plus rising demand, plus a volatile local economy prone to booms and busts, plus strict rent control without vacancy control, and entrenched interests which is almost never aligned.

Amanda Burden: How public spaces make cities work

If you have 18 minutes, you should watch this Amanda Burden: How public spaces make cities work TED Talk:

Amanda Burden is the former director of the New York City Department of City Planning and chair of the City Planning Commission under Mayor Mike Bloomberg. If you ignore the semi-hagiographic retelling of the massive rezoning under Mayor Bloomberg, you can hear some really interesting quotes. Overall her presentation says exactly the right things:

  • “How might we create successful, meaningful public spaces”
  • “Details make a difference because we are bodies in space.”
  • “You can’t fake understanding of the neighborhood.”
  • “You have to have faith in plans.”
  • “Tap into your humanity, not your expertise.”

The last quote, I take would have to challenge: I agree that you have to tap into your inner humanity, and be person centered in your design. But to not listen to your expertise is to remove an important tool which can help your fellow humanity.

God View in Port-au-Prince

Fast Company asks, Port-au-Prince 2.0: A City of Urban Villages? discussing Duany Plater-Zyberk’s new plan for Port-au-Prince (download the Downtown Port Au Prince Renewal Plan for full draft proposal):

Can Port-au-Prince be saved? More than a year after a catastrophic earthquake devastated Haiti, much of the capital is still rubble, with basic infrastructure (water, power, sewage) nonexistent. Reclaiming the core of the old city could require block-by-block redevelopment, at least according to the plans presented last night in Haiti by the architect Andrés Duany and his firm Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company.

The plans envision partial demolition of existing blocks to create parking and open space in the middle of each one. Strict codes and zoning rules would carefully regulate what gets built. Over time, one- and two-story building would be built out to four stories, with buildings on the perimeter opening onto the streets.

Answering his own question of why the plans privileged so much parking, Duany — a founding father of the New Urbanist movement — was characteristically blunt. “If Port-au-Prince is to be rebuilt, it can only be amortized by the middle class and above. The question is: how do we bring them back? Because you cannot reconstruct the city without them.”

I can’t quibble with the design: Port Au Prince historically had a mid-rise density (3-5 floors) so replacing it with a plan for growth approximating the existing height does not bother me. The focus on cars is a Middle Class MacGuffin: setting aside so much land and infrastructure for private automobiles with a hope (a hope) of supporting a perceived want, instead of supplying a concrete need – that of providing room for 2 million people – is a huge oversight. 3-4 floors is fairly dense with the inclusion of front arcades, while historical, makes sense in a tropical climate. Hopefully any zoning would allow flexibility of use so that live/work spaces could occupy the block creating a vibrant streetscape and income for those living in the units.

But the real shortfall is deeper than the design presented and is illustrated by the above image: a god’s eye view. While there were community design charrettes (I would like to know more about the process), urban design as a whole seem to suffer from overuse of the god view, divorced from the street and the person. Perhaps the scale of the system and the totality which the designer is trying to control (not to mention the history of SimCity) pushes the god view as the only way to illustrate the total system.

I wish I had a better alternative. I admit that I am looking for a better theoretical underpinning for my thoughts on urban design, and I hope to talk more about this in the near future.