San Francisco Is Suffering From The Excesses Of Its Own Liberalism

[Investing In Chicago]

Originally Posted by Crawford

The CHA was arguing this "point" because they wanted to get rid of their housing, not because they had some design epiphany. It's vastly cheaper to just give everyone Section 8 vouchers than to repair a bajillion towers with 50 years of deferred maintenance. And it doesn't even make any sense. Lowrise projects aren't going to have a playground in front of every unit.

As someone with 20 years of experience in affordable housing, I can assure you there's zero scholarship indicating that highrises are, in any way, more dysfunctional than lowrise structures. You'll notice that CHA destroyed almost all its lowrises too. Public housing agencies, for the most part, no longer want to manage housing; they just want to be Section 8 conduits.

I agree with vouchers 100%...I just think there is some merit to not being able to keep an eye on your kids from 20 stories up argument, but admittedly i'm not involved in public / affordable housing, so I could be wrong.

[Khantilever]

Originally Posted by BrownTown

Just want to make a quick point about high rents being balanced out by high wages:

While I obviously understand that from an individual point of view this is the same as making less money in a less expensive area I think from a country wide point of view it's very bad. You're basically having some people who are paid significantly more in one place to do the exact same job. That's not efficient for the Economy at all. The workers in San Francisco are less cost effective than they would be somewhere else. Obviously this is why many companies are moving to less expensive areas.

They’re making more money in the Bay Area because they’re more “productive” there, meaning there’s a higher return on labor. If you’re a barista, your labor is more valuable in an area with lots of coffee drinkers. If you’re a tech worker, your labor is more valuable in an area with a tech cluster and other techies with whom you can share ideas.

There’s nothing inefficient about this. The biggest inefficiency is the overregulated housing supply that prevents these benefits of density being more widely shared by keeping people out of those markets.

[dubu]

I thought it didn’t matter where you lived with tech jobs because you can have meetings with FaceTime and only like once a year go to the office. There’s people from California that live here that used to live over in sf or wherever and still do the same job

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by Crawford

To me, Robert Taylor illustrates the failures of funding and federal rules.

While the U.S., as a whole, horribly underfunded public housing, CHA was particularly infamous. The feds basically paid for construction and localities were expected to take over, but, in Chicago, that never happened.

And federal rules required that Robert Taylor only house the poor, and, in the late 1970's federal rules were modified to give preference to jobless single mothers. That was basically the death knell.

If Robert Taylor were a mixed-income complex with semi-decent funding, I would bet it would be standing today. Yeah, the design sucked, it would probably be segregated, but I doubt it would have become a hellhole.

i don't disagree with any of that. i was just pointing out that robert taylor's design did not do the project any favors whatsoever in terms of producing a successful outcome.

and it wasn't anything inherent about the highrises themselves that was the design failure, it was the overall completely anti-urban plan of the complex that was the design failure in my eyes. cutting people of from the city around them is never a good idea, unless you're intentionally trying to build a prison or something.

[mhays]

Originally Posted by Pedestrian

Actually in many cases I think the replacement construction houses as many people as the high rises being replaced because most of the high rises were surrounded by little utilized open space and the lower rise replacement typically covers the site.

However, I do agree the management by public agencies has typically been awful, tolerating all sorts of criminal activity and abuse of the property by tenants. In a way, management of some of these projects has been sort of a microcosm of the government of San Francisco now that I think about it.

Then I'd say (a) manage it properly, and (b) don't do the empty spaces. That way you can get much higher density.

[Pedestrian]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Public housing in the U.S. has failed, generally speaking, but it has nothing to do with high rises. The best public housing in the U.S. is almost entirely high rise.

People don't act better or worse if they're in a 2- or 20-floor building. The failure of American public housing is (mostly) a failure of funding and federal rules.

You are flat wrong and just about all modern thinking on the subject disagrees with you. It isn't the height of buildings that matters but the design features that height requires such as elevators, lobbies, interior hallways and so on.

High-Rise Hellholes
ALEXANDER HOFFMAN DECEMBER 19, 2001

. . . When it opened in November 1962, Robert Taylor Homes was the world's largest public housing project. The complex extended more than two miles along State Street on Chicago's South Side and comprised 28 buildings, 16 stories each, containing almost 4,300 apartments in all. By 1965 it was home to 27,000 souls, 20,000 of them children and young people, and it already had gained a local reputation as a dangerous and forbidding place. Twenty years later, Robert Taylor Homes, along with another Chicago high-rise project, Cabrini-Green, had become a national symbol of urban squalor . . . .

. . . the CHA staff was overwhelmed by the challenge of maintaining an enormous but poorly planned physical plant. The elevators, for example, broke
down constantly. When the elevators stopped between floors, passengers were forced to climb out, and once a child fell down the elevator shaft. In another
incident, three children died when a broken elevator prevented firemen from reaching the 14th floor in time . . . .

. . . gang leaders decided to turn the youth gangs--which previously had mainly attacked one another--into drug-dealing operations. The gangs commandeered lobbies, stairwells, and apartments, intimidating all whom they encountered. Rival gangs clashed over market shares, and shoot-outs and casualties became common. Noncombatant residents were afraid to leave their apartments . . . .

http://prospect.org/article/high-rise-hellholes

Different designs, it has been found, can prevent a lot of this. Modern concepts require each unit to have its own exterior entrance--no interior hallways, lobbies, stairwells and, preferably, no elevators. Exterior spaces should be, as much as possible, clearly visible from surrounding streets and accessible to police and emergency vehicles . . . and so on.

Basically this


https://missionhousing.org/mhdc_proj...encia-gardens/

is what is replacing the 1950s high rises.

[McBane]

I know of some high rise complexes that are hardly mixed income but have very little crime and no one is asking to tear them down. How about the entire Upper West Side? Or what about Rittenhouse Square? I don't "get" the argument that living in a high rise perpetuates crime. Instead of blaming the building, maybe it's the building's inhabitants?

[Pedestrian]

Originally Posted by McBane

I know of some high rise complexes that are hardly mixed income but have very little crime and no one is asking to tear them down. How about the entire Upper West Side? Or what about Rittenhouse Square? I don't "get" the argument that living in a high rise perpetuates crime. Instead of blaming the building, maybe it's the building's inhabitants?

New York in particular seems to have some unique models of "coop" ownership and so on. When residents own their homes or a stake in coop ownership, things are very different. But there is a class of very poor resident who cannot do other than rent a home for a nominal sum and they are the occupants of most US public housing, including in SF which this thread is about. Such people are very often single parent households, often with poorly parented teenaged children and so on.

Clearly it's the inhabitants who are at fault, but the point I have been making is that it is now a widely accepted principle that design of the housing can mitigate irremediable issues with the people and chronic flaws in the management. Maybe in other cities they just kick misbehaving families with kids--kids who may be in gangs, dealing drugs, all of it--out of public housing onto the streets but that rarely happens in SF. So the idea is to at least make it as difficult as possible for the housing to facilitate criminal activity.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by Pedestrian

You are flat wrong and just about all modern thinking on the subject disagrees with you.

You couldn't be more wrong. There is no one in the design or affordable housing community who holds such bizarre, outlandish views.

In fact, there has never been more subsidized highrise housing at any point in human history than right now. The public housing disaster in the U.S. has nothing to do with building heights.

Even in the U.S., the share of public highrise housing has almost certainly grown in recent years, because highrise housing is superconcentrated in NYC and the rest of the country basically demolished all housing (high- and lowrise). There are about as many people living in NYC public housing as in Boston or Seattle.

[Pedestrian]

Originally Posted by McBane

I know of some high rise complexes that are hardly mixed income but have very little crime and no one is asking to tear them down. How about the entire Upper West Side? Or what about Rittenhouse Square? I don't "get" the argument that living in a high rise perpetuates crime. Instead of blaming the building, maybe it's the building's inhabitants?

We have some of those too as I mentioned way back. They are full of seniors, disabled adults and so on, not single mothers with kids. It's the badly parented kids who cause most of the trouble. Eliminated them and yiou eliminate the problem.

So what SF has done is rebuild some of the old high rise public housing along the lower rise lines in the photo above. Other buildings, though, have been renovated in their existing form, added onto and made exclusively for seniors and disabled adults.

This


became this


Images: https://www.google.com/search?q=Rosa...o0MQGT-b5xMrM:

[Investing In Chicago]

Originally Posted by McBane

I know of some high rise complexes that are hardly mixed income but have very little crime and no one is asking to tear them down. How about the entire Upper West Side? Or what about Rittenhouse Square? I don't "get" the argument that living in a high rise perpetuates crime. Instead of blaming the building, maybe it's the building's inhabitants?

I think it was pretty obviously stated that the discussion was around public housing/affordable housing and not market rate housing. Poor people stuffed into an exclusively public housing highrise is a recipe for disaster, nobody is worrying about highrises with condos that sell for $2,500/sq ft creating crime.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by McBane

I know of some high rise complexes that are hardly mixed income but have very little crime and no one is asking to tear them down. How about the entire Upper West Side? Or what about Rittenhouse Square? I don't "get" the argument that living in a high rise perpetuates crime. Instead of blaming the building, maybe it's the building's inhabitants?

NYCHA, which has been the model U.S. public housing agency since its inception, is overwhelmingly highrise housing, and yet crime and social dysfunction are pretty low for big-city standards.

Again, "blaming the building height" while a common trope among politicians and the public, is nonsense in the affordable housing world. It's based on nothing.

[Pedestrian]

Originally Posted by Crawford

You couldn't be more wrong. There is no one in the design or affordable housing community who holds such bizarre, outlandish views.

In fact, there has never been more subsidized highrise housing at any point in human history than right now. The public housing disaster in the U.S. has nothing to do with building heights.

Even in the U.S., the share of public highrise housing has almost certainly grown in recent years, because highrise housing is superconcentrated in NYC and the rest of the country basically demolished all housing (high- and lowrise). There are about as many people living in NYC public housing as in Boston or Seattle.

I hate tit for tat so I'm ignoring your further comments but that is wrong and bizarre. I've followed the discussion of what to do with these massive 1950s era projects in the US for decades. When it comes to design, the discussion almost always indicates the preferability of the sort of thing I've described for the poorest families.

I think maybe you are confusing "affordable housing" for low wage working people with true "public housing" for the mostly unemployed poorest of the poor. There is a huge difference. Even in SF, we are building new "affordable" housing, which may be rental or for-sale, but not true "public housing" which is all rental, for nominal rents. Other places may not make this distinction. I don't know about that. The bottom line is that high rise works when people have a stake in the place, either through ownership or by some other means. But if it's just a place they are being warehoused at virtually no cost to them, they mistreat it so the design needs to take that into consideration

[mhays]

The site off City Hall is for adults, not families. New housing for formerly-homeless adults in big cities is almost universally apartment buildings with hallways and elevators. In fact it's often a key design feature that everyone walk by a staffer at the front desk.

[pizzaguy]

BREAKING NEWS: Old white man blames liberals for ruining America!

[JManc]

The actual buildings have nothing to do with the social problems they faced (well, maybe a little) but it's more about where they are located...usually isolated away from everyone/ everything else.

[mello]

Haven't read whole thread. Just wanted to clear up a statement by Crawford, yes San Diego has a major homeless issue (Haven't been to LA or SF in years so can't compare) however, the homeless are NOT aggressive. I want around our version of Skid Row often and have never seen homeless people being aggressive to pedestrians or others. I have also never heard of their "aggressiveness" being a problem from anyone and I'm an SD native.

** Also let's please put the San Diego being conservative thing to rest its not the 1980's anymore.

[tablemtn]

usually isolated away from everyone/ everything else.

That really wasn't true of a place like the Taylor Homes, though, which was a short bus-ride away from one of the biggest/most-lucrative job markets in the entire nation in downtown Chicago. Hence, why the market value of that land was always pretty high even when the homes were at their lowest. There was an hourlong news special from 1987 called "Crisis on Federal Street" that focused on violence in Chicago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xxn9-IPJsS4

We also don't see mass-violence and social decay in (for example) isolated high-rise complexes in parts of the world like China or South Korea - and there are quite a few. Or the gigantic Mamutica complex in Zagreb. In a place like Chicago public housing, part of the issue was a near-complete lack of law enforcement, which allowed gangs to become the de facto rulers of those areas. Part of the big push to "clean up" NYC in the 90's involved teams of officers conducting regular patrols inside of public housing structures, something that had previously been avoided.

[jtown,man]

Originally Posted by pizzaguy

BREAKING NEWS: Old white man blames liberals for ruining America!

I don't know what someones race or age has to do with pointing out real issues? Guess hes whitesplaining and agesplaining.

[cannedairspray]

He sounds mad.