The Streets of San Francisco: Chevy Chevette

Walking down 17th near Hartford in San Francisco last night and came across this orange icon. A rare vintage Chevette. Even rarer...no rust.

GMC Diesel and The World's Greatest Parking Job

If you're going to own a GMC Diesel like this one in San Francisco, it goes without saying you better have some serious parking skills. And the ability to climb out the rear window when you're done.

Always Something There To Remind Me

Lint rollers on sale at Heartfelt in San Francisco. Not to be confused with the famous Helmac Lint Roller of Roger & Me fame.

Sunday Morning in San Francisco

What we talk about when we talk about San Francisco

For a hint of what conversations are like in San Francisco these days — amidst the housing crisis, homelessness problem, and gentrification wars — I present a recent verbatim email exchange among four longtime residents. Names have been changed to Oscar, Felix, Murray, and Roy. 

On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 10:11 AM Oscar wrote:
My position on housing in SF as fantastically articulated by Sonja Trauss, a "deeply eccentric city-government nerd" and housing activist in SF. Interestingly, I read about her in The Stranger, a Seattle paper. It may have something to do with the fact that here in SF, at least in the Mission, pictures of her with dollar signs for eyes have been taped to telephone polls. Here's her evil plot:

"We need more housing units, and the market-rate units we build now will become tomorrow’s middle-income apartments. Her theory is based on her experience working for a neighborhood advisory committee in a rapidly gentrifying part of Philadelphia right before the mid-2000s housing bubble burst. “When the market crashed,” Trauss told me, “all those projects we had approved went on sale for a third of the price they would have, while all the projects we gummed up were never built. We lost the opportunity to create more units.”

Lest you think she is in the pocket of the developers, like a lot of Missionites apparently do, she is also a member of an organization that is trying to sue Bay Area suburbs for their restrictive building policies, i.e. they're trying to force suburbs to build more housing, too.

I like her position because it's considers the long view. We don't want to be the people in the 60's and 70's who fought BART expansion because it seemed like too much change. And it would have definitely changed neighborhoods then, maybe even for the worse (16th and 18^th BART weren't nice 'hoods for a long time) but obviously we could really use those proposed BART stops now, 40 years later.

It's the same with housing. Market rate stuff today might become middle class housing later, but you have to build it while there's demand or it might not ever get done. Look how hard it is to find developers now to build affordable housing; wouldn't it be great if 40 years ago more stuff had been built? We will likely be thinking the same thing 40 years from now.

And if you don't build market rate stuff now, it puts enormous pressure on the existing housing stock. There have been 5 homes that have sold on my block in the past year, 4 of which were 2 million dollars, and 1 of which was 1 million that's going to be flipped for at least twice that. These were middle class and lower class homes just 10-20 years ago. There is no way I could afford my neighborhood now, and I bought just 5 years ago. Only rich people can move in now.

So when I hear "oh great, a new building is going up for rich people," it seems to me that rich people are moving here whether we build stuff or not, so do you want them buying up all the existing houses/condos in formerly poor and middle class neighborhoods, putting enormous pressure on landlords to sell, or do you want them in new buildings? Because they're coming here either way. It doesn't mean we have to do it carte blanche, we can still have robust planning and zoning and affordable housing requirements for new apartment buildings. But we have to build.

Sorry for the longness. I think I really need a job.

On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 10:53 AM Felix wrote:

Yes, we need rigorous zoning so that we build in order to satisfy demand while not destroying the character of the city. Of course it's going to change, but we need to guide that change in order to maintain the things we cherish in the city and the things that people move here for. 

But we also need to find a way to build affordable housing. Market rate housing just doesn't work in places like San Francisco that are geographically limited. It's simply impossible and keeps getting demonstrated in any other development area where geography is a key factor like Manhattan, London, or Hong Kong. 

And that leads to the larger issues here. The entire Bay Area needs to develop together which requires more pockets of urban density, a very robust transit system area wide, and a more united local government because the administration of growth has been lacking. I'll leave the larger area governance question for later but here in San Francisco we have a local government that struggles to play an effective role in all of these questions. Part of that is simple leadership in that Ed Lee clearly is not the person to lead a discussion nor find the programs nor hire the people to make the changes. Part is structural in that the city has to live within a legislative structure erected over 150 years. Part is due the depressingly normal state of political anomie by our citizens.

On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 11:21 AM Oscar wrote:

But what if we can't figure out a way to build affordable housing? Because my guess is we won't (we never have). What if we don't get a dynamic leader to help the entire Bay Area develop in concert? Don't hold your breath (since I've been here we've had Brown, Newsom, and Lee). The argument seems to be if we can't build perfectly, we shouldn't build at all. And that leaves us in our current situation, with way more demand than supply, and the things we cherish get changed anyway because the rich keep moving here. It's the classic situation of the perfect being the enemy of the good.

I'm curious about your contention that market rate housing just doesn't work in SF. What proof is there of that? There is evidence that rents started really going up in 50's, which is when a most of SF land was built on. Since then, there just hasn't been an ability to easily build out, we can just build up. And most of SF has been against building up since then, and continues to be. I'm not sure you can say that something doesn't work if it hasn't really been tried.

And as for keeping the character of SF intact, that doesn't seem possible. I've been here since '97 and it's now a totally different city, and in '97 it was a totally different city than it was in '77. I'm not even sure what SF's character is right now, or if anybody comes here because of it. I think people come here because of the economy, and they want to live in SF because it's a fun city with a lot of bars and restaurants. No one's coming here because it's a cool art scene, or because it's so bohemian. That era is long gone, probably before any of us even moved here.

On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 2:06 PM Murray wrote:

Frighteningly, I'm not sure we are not all right at the same time. Which seems like a bad sign.

Some timely reading from my favorite mayoral candidate:

http://www.sfexaminer.com/portland-fears-following-san-franciscos-footsteps/

A favorite quote from one of my favorite union leaders:

"Change is inevitable; progress is not."

On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 3:50 PM Felix wrote:

Nah, I want to avoid the perfect/good dichotomy. If we do nothing we get what we have now, rampant traffic and development that doesn't fit together. It'll hit a wall soon, there will be another election battle over growth, but good policy probably won't win out. 

The thing is that we know how to build affordable housing but it takes lots of planning, lots of collaboration with developers, and more of a region wide solution. We're doing it all over SOMA, in the Castro, Bay View, and in Oakland. Most notably we are not doing it in Marin, and the vast majority of the peninsula where there is tons of land. And we're not developing the transportation network that we need to get people from affordable areas on the periphery of Alameda to the jobs everywhere else. One of the big problems here is that we haven't been doing it for decades so there's pent up demand. 

Everything I've read about development policy in NY says that the city explicitly embraced market rate housing growth as the solution to cost from the 90's through the Bloomberg administration. They built hundreds of thousands of units and the cost of housing only increased while affordable housing decreased. I remember reading that Bloomberg's own housing czar admitted that market rate housing solutions didn't work but can't dig up that piece. I've read the same for cities with constrained space, high foreign capital flows, which are also perceived as very desirable. Here's one piece that is a summation of Bloomberg's housing policies but keep in mind that he was just continuing the Giuliani administration's policies so that's 20 years of aggressive development that continues to this day. 

http://www.wnyc.org/story/304422-new-york-remade-city-more-desirable-ever-also-too-expensive-many/

Sure, the city has changed dramatically since I moved here and I don't know if I can define the character of it either but you sound like the worst crotchety old man by saying it's not cool any more. It's definitely a different sort of cool, there is all sorts of crazy innovative stuff happening here that may not be traditional art but it's pretty amazing. I'll skip technology altogether. Look at the culinary world alone where SF is in the white hot center of the coffee/brewing/chocolate/sustainable food/and many other movements. The high culture scene is insane with the new SFMOMA being just the latest addition. Sports culture is everywhere from our professional teams to all the amateur soccer action, climbing gyms, the surfing at Ocean Beach, bicyclists, you name it. Take two small examples of literary culture, LitQuake and 826 as examples of that scene. And that's just what I know about. God knows what the literal kids are doing today. 

But back to solutions. Everyone agrees that we need housing, and that we need affordable housing so let's figure out how to build it so that everyone wins. The same goes for business regulations, transportation, schools, homelessness, and the other big issues facing the city and region. We need to carve a way out of this stasis because that's where we've been for far too long. Everyone is frustrated to point of giving up which is incredibly dangerous. I see that frequently in my own little corner of volunteer activism at Mila's school. It's really easy to burn out and give up because the process it so difficult to deal with. But everything is going to keep turning so if you can stay engaged then your voice is going to be heard more than anyone else's. With that somewhat minor observation I have to stop because I actually have work to do today, or perhaps I should start viewing this as my true work.

On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 4:32 PM Oscar wrote:

I think we just like different things. Most of the cool stuff you mention about SF is due to it being a city full of well-off and rich people (the rest is due to it being in a naturally beautiful region). All that coffee/food/sustainability stuff really took off in the 90's and 00's after the tech booms, though I grant you that the seeds of some of it was already here. But it takes money to support $4 cups of coffee, $8 beer pints, and $25/pound sustainably caught salmon at Avedanos. So it seems like if the city becomes even wealthier, you'll just get more of what you like. It's not like New York or London lack that stuff, even if they're not on the forefront of it, they're adopting it. It seems to me the culture you want to keep is just upper-middle class culture. Which is nice, don't get me wrong, but I wouldn't describe it as especially cool, to my taste anyway. And I certainly don't see it going away, it just seems to get stronger. And it's funny speculating what the kids are doing here, because there are fewer literal kids in SF than any comparable city in the US.

But my point was really that people aren't moving here for the culture. They're moving here to get jobs, because this is where a huge new economy is growing. That's going to make it more expensive, no matter how many places we build. But if we don't build anything, then it's going to be more expensive than if we build nothing. And we have to give people who move here for jobs someplace to live. Nowhere in the article on NYC did it say how many units Bloomberg built, and it doesn't give any info on how expensive it might be if they hadn't been built, nor does it talk about how many people would be living outside NYC and commuting there. I'm sure there are some economists who have an opinion on all that. Building housing might not make things cheaper immediately, but it sure doesn't make things more expensive.

But I do agree that we need better planning and zoning of all sorts. We just can't, for instance, not build anything in the Mission for 2 years while we get things just right, because if our history with BART or MUNI is any indication, we'll never get it exactly right. And we need to get more housing in the Peninsula, but again, we can't say we won't build stuff here until that happens. All the stuff you want is great but should have been done decades ago, and now we don't have the luxury of waiting for it.

On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 4:45 PM Felix wrote:

Sorry, I'll respond to everything else later but the figures I've seen for the Bloomberg administration alone are 160,000 units to house more than 300,000 people. There's lots written about it, take a look. 

And it's not like we're not building here. We've been building at a torrid pace of at least 3,500 units/year going back at least a few years and permits for building are almost quadruple that last year. 

On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 4:50 PM Oscar wrote:

We might be building at a torrid pace for SF, but we could build a lot more than 3,500 a year if we wanted. And I'm talking about density, tall shit, in neighborhoods with existing transit.

Anyway, we should clearly talk about this more offline but I'm just curious--are you saying that NYC shouldn't have built those 160,000 housing units because they caused housing in NYC to become more expensive?

On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 5:02 PM Roy wrote:

I haven't had time to ready your back and forth, but I hope you all read this: 

https://experimental-geography.blogspot.com/2016/05/employment-construction-and-cost-of-san.html?m=1

This is all new. I'd be curious to see this done with data from other cities to see if it holds. If so, there appear to be implications for understanding what impacts housing affordability and, more specifically, how you can forecast and plan to address it.

https://twitter.com/andersem/status/732151176683130881

And here's a follow-up that says SF is screwed but other cities have a chance not to be screwed. 

On Fri, May 20, 2016 at 8:56 AM Felix wrote:
In the urban future all cities are going to face this challenge so maintaining a unique sense of place, diversity, and affordability are all the major concerns for urbanists these days. 

WRT NY's development, I'm just saying that they built aggressively and housing only got more expensive so simply building doesn't do anything for affordability, it just creates more housing for the affluent, lots of it as parking lots for international cash. You really have to manage it otherwise you run into the same problem. All things considered SF may not be doing that badly simply because it has so many requirement for affordable housing but there is a lot of room for improvement. 

As for what we're doing, yes, density is great. We're doing tons of that. Look at Rincon where massive condo developments have been built for the past ten years. There's plenty more to come because that's the long term plan for the city, ie develop density along transport corridors. There are even bright spots elsewhere, there's this huge project to build densely all along El Camino Real which is a real change. 

The Hidden Economies of San Francisco

No Relation

Surrounded by Soft Modernism in San Francisco

The Economics of Community Space

While Flint continues to transform its struggling downtown into a place where residents can gather in community spaces, tech companies in San Francisco are taking a different approach that's reminiscent of the bunker mentality that defined projects like the original Renaissance Center in Detroit.

Allison Arieff of The New York Times writes:

Tech companies are scrambling to move into cities — there are rumors that Google is going to move here, to San Francisco, from Mountain View. VISA and Akamai have ditched the suburbs to come here. Tech tenants now fill 22 percent of all occupied office space in San Francisco — and represented a whopping 61 percent of all office leasing in the city last year. But they might as well have stayed in their suburban corporate settings for all the interacting they do with the outside world. The oft-referred-to “serendipitous encounters” that supposedly drive the engine of innovation tend to happen only with others who work for the same company. Which is weird.

Cadillac Style in San Francisco

Photo by Bhautik Joshi via sfist.com.

How to Understand Flint Expatriates Stationed in San Francisco

This is just a joke. Sort of.

Color Coordinating in San Francisco

Think your truck is big and impressive? I bet it's not as big and impressive as this Chevrolet Apache I spotted parked in San Francisco's West Portal neighborhood today. And I bet your truck isn't color-coordinated with your house.

Buick Graffiti

Two friends recently bought a house on the south slope of Bernal Heights in San Francisco and we spotted these oil change records scrawled on the basement wall last weekend. The previous owner was clearly a Buick Man (or Woman). Let's just ignore the Olds reference.

The Streets of San Francisco in a Ford Fiesta

Any Flint Expatriates out there who happen to drive a Ford Fiesta and planning a vacation to San Francisco? If so, here's a handy video trip planner.

Dream Cars: Chevrolet Monte Carlo

Spotted on the streets of San Francisco.

Is It Time for the Flint City Council to Shrink?

Does it seem odd that Flint still has nine City Council members representing nine wards given the city's dramatic population drop over the past few decades? With a population of roughly 100,000 and falling, each Flint City Council member represents about 11,000 citizens.

By contrast, San Francisco has 11 districts and a population of approximately 800,000. That means each member of the Board of Supervisors represents about 73,000 residents. Chicago has a population of 2.7 million represented by 50 aldermen. That works out to one elected official for every 54,000 citizens.

Given Flint's ongoing budget woes, this would be a drop in the bucket, but there's certainly money that could be saved by reducing the number of wards and city council members. Given the low voter turnout at many of the city's 61 precincts, it might make sense to consolidate those as well.

In case you're wondering, the 2011-2012 City of Flint budget allocated $899,922 to the city council. You can find a pdf of the budget here.

Please note that this is not some Tea Party inspired post that reflexively endorses smaller government in all circumstances. It's also not a reflection of the City Council's performance, although I'm sure that's open to debate. This idea is more a reflection of Flint's reality. The current ward system was established when Flint had a lot more people and a lot more money. Maybe it's time to make an adjustment.

Any thoughts?

Ghosts of Flint in San Francisco

I saw this old Chevy with an industrial background today on Florida Street near 16th on my way to lunch. It reminded me of Flint.

Having grown up in Flint during the golden age of customized vans, I was duly impressed when I spotted this gem parked on the western slope of Bernal Heights this weekend.

Flint as a Decorative Element

My friend M.G. spotted this pillow today at the Jonathan Adler decor shop on Fillmore Street in San Francisco. The price? $98. The designer started with a series of needlepoint pillows of exotic upscale locales like St. Tropez and Monte Carlo, then followed up with a series featuring places that are, well, exotic for different reasons — Flint, Fresno, and Scranton. I suppose you could find this offensive in some way, but as someone who regularly vacations in Flint, it makes sense to me. I just wish they were a little cheaper.

Say yah to da U.P., dude!

Flint Expatriate Joe "The Quilter" Cunningham passed along this intriguing map, perfect for anyone interested in both sourdough bread and pasties. Or gay bars and snowmobiling. Or the Golden Gate Bridge and the Mackinac Bridge. Or cable cars and hockey. Or Golden Gate Park and Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park. Okay, I'll stop now.

The Ghosts of Michigan

Lots of Flint reminders in San Francisco today, starting with a Cadillac Fleetwood with the world's worst paint job, synthetic fur on the hood, and an after-market gun turret. (Sometimes it's really hard not to love California.)







I realize these shots might offend readers who spend their spare time restoring G.M. classics and actually like cars that look good. (Yes, I'm talking about Gerry Godin at All Things Buick.) So here's something that will calm you down that I found just two blocks from the Caddy — an almost mint Chevy pickup.




Not sure if either of these was actually manufactured in Flint but G.M. cars of any kind are scarce in San Francisco, so they'll have to do.