SF's Housing Crisis Explained - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/ <comment><USER2> This piece is very perceptive in portraying Prop 13 property-tax caps and rent-control as sibling policies, each feeding destructive "I've got mine" politics. They both bribe incumbent owners/renters/voters with an economically valuable seniority privilege, at the expense of the future and flexibility. Children and young adults suffer the most: they move the most, and none have the benefit of paying frozen base rates established 20-30 years ago.

I wonder if both rent-control and prop-tax-caps could be knocked down in an equal-protection lawsuit. Why does the person who moved in yesterday, perhaps far needier than the longer-term resident/owner (and just as deserving of basic civic services) have to pay so much more? Is duration-of-residence a legitimate basis for such strong civic discrimination rooted in law?

<comment><USER3> > Why does the person who moved in yesterday, perhaps far needier than the > longer-term resident/owner (and just as deserving of basic civic services) > have to pay so much more?

Property taxes without caps are just as unfair but in the opposite direction. Why should someone who lives within their means and bought an affordable house be punished just because a bunch of other people swoop in and drive up prices around them. A buyer of a house needs to be able to forecast future tax payments to make an informed decision. If you don't have a yearly increase cap on property tax rates, the buyers future costs are totally unpredictable and up the whims of the markets and bubbles.

<comment><USER4> Give me a moment while I play sad songs on this tiny violin for old people who are sitting on valuable assets.

 _tiny violin songs, very sad_

OK then, let's talk about reality. Letting incumbents under-utilize valuable real estate is a bad policy. Anyway nobody gets thrown out of their house for owing property taxes in California because the local authorities just put liens on the property. Once the old folks kick the bucket, the local govt collects on their lien from the heirs or buyers.

There are also several other non-old-people-getting-evicted problems with Prop 13 and its siblings. There certainly is not any excuse for the ability to pass your property tax assessment on to your children or grandchildren.

<comment><USER5> You realize prop 13 is a statewide policy, not just a north beach community standard, right ?

So while you're thinking of (and playing violins for) a certain sect that you know well here in the cosmopolitan city, there are also hundreds of thousands of "99 percenter" property owners throughout California that really do hurt as they scrape to make ends meet with the major (and usually only) asset they will ever own.

<comment><USER6> One half-fix sometimes proposed to solve the most egregious Prop 13 issues but leave it in place for the people you're talking about is to limit it to only owner-occupied primary residences. As it stands today, Prop 13 applies to not only homes people actually live in, but also investment property, vacation homes, even commercial real-estate. Imo any "protect the nature of our community" / "keep old people from being displaced" type justification makes a lot less sense when we're talking about Intel's property taxes, or about property held by real-estate investment trusts.

<comment><USER7> I think this is far more reasonable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is by far the most comprehensive overview of the Bay Area's messed up development priorities I've seen in one place. Kim-Mai Cutler does a great job stringing all the threads of the housing crisis together.

I don't think San Francisco can build its way out of outrageous rents alone. The other cities in the Bay Area need to step up and provide the type of urban housing close to transit that people want. No more surface parking lots next to train stations.

<comment><USER9> Agreed -- an amazingly good piece. I doubt that many will actually read all of it, but if you're curious about why San Francisco is in the state it's in, Kim-Mai Cutler gives you no excuses for not educating yourself.

Also, for those that believe there is no alternative: the East Bay remains the best kept secret in San Francisco. When we moved here from the City for schools, we were braced for a let-down -- but having been here for six years, we know now that we will never return to the City, even when the kids are grown and gone...

<comment><USER10> Please don't capitalize "city" when referring to SF. To smaller cities it looks pompous, and to bigger cities, laughable.

<comment><USER11> Having only lived in the SF Bay Area for a few years now, everyone I know that lives in the SF Bay Area refers to San Francisco simply as "the city". They say things like "I went to the city this weekend", etc. So while I agree with the silly capitalisation, I also think it's a losing battle.

It's also not a behaviour unique to the SF Bay Area; when I lived in a fairly rural area (pop. < 10K spread over quite a few miles), the largest city nearby was often referred to as "the city" by everyone that lived outside the largest nearby city (which was Kansas City where I lived).

<comment><USER12> It's weird; I grew up in a San Jose suburb and never once heard of San Francisco referred to as "the city" or "The City". I heard "Frisco", of all things, and "SF", but never "the city".

I have no idea what changed.

<comment><USER13> I was born in 81 in the north bay, then and now we always said "the city". Possibly geographic?

<comment><USER12> Ah. I was South Bay. That might actually explain it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Very interesting, that Piketty's "Capital in the 21st Century" is introduced in this article:

 _A lot of other VCs and founders are also digesting Thomas Piketty's new book, "Capital in the 21st Century." With more than 200 years of data, it chronicles an inexorable rise in inequality that was punctuated in the middle of the 20th century by the Great Depression and World War II followed by 30 years of evenly-spread prosperity. Ultimately, it advocates a globally- coordinated tax on wealth._

I know that it's taboo on HN to get overly political, but I think because of Piketty's work we should talk about it (particularly, _because_ Piketty's new piece is so groundbreaking [1] and incredibly well-backed with data). What do you guys think of his "global wealth tax" \-- tax on capital (including real property), in the context of the new SV riches?

[1]: The book is being received as "the most important economiscs text of the decade" by a lot of high-placed economists, etc.: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty- First_Cen...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty- First_Century#Reception)

<comment><USER15> ""How can you dismiss socialism so casually?"

"I've thought a lot about this, actually; it was not a casual remark. I think the fundamental question is not whether the government pays for schools or medicine, but whether you allow people to get rich.

In England in the 1970s, the top income tax rate was 98%. That's what the Beatles' song "Tax Man" is referring to when they say "one for you, nineteen for me."

Any country that makes this choice ends up losing net, because new technology tends to be developed by people trying to make their fortunes. It's too much work for anyone to do for ordinary wages. Smart people might work on sexy projects like fighter planes and space rockets for ordinary wages, but semiconductors or light bulbs or the plumbing of e-commerce probably have to be developed by entrepreneurs. Life in the Soviet Union would have been even poorer if they hadn't had American technologies to copy.

Finland is sometimes given as an example of a prosperous socialist country, but apparently the combined top tax rate is 55%, only 5% higher than in California. So if they seem that much more socialist than the US, it is probably simply because they don't spend so much on their military."

[http://paulgraham.com/resay.html](http://paulgraham.com/resay.html)

(I know that in the US anything even vaguely leftist gets called "socialism", but Thomas Piketty, the author, is a genuine strong supporter of the French Socialist Party, and the focus of the book is explicitly on government action to prevent anyone from getting 'too' rich. I think it's a fair criticism.)

EDIT: To those not familiar with British history, things got _really_ bad during the 1970s. Inflation peaked at 27%. The government went bankrupt and had to go "cap-in-hand" to the IMF for a bailout. Garbage piled up in the streets because the sanitation workers were on strike. _Bodies_ piled up because the _gravediggers_ were on strike... ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_of_Discontent](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_of_Discontent)). I don't want to get into an argument about Thatcher, but everyone at all familiar with the history agrees that the country was in a mess.

<comment><USER16> Thats nonsense.

England / the UK is a mess at the moment. They are heavily in debt. They keep on cutting benefits to the poor and allowing the rich to pay even less tax. According to your argument everything should be getting better because of this, but I assure you it is not.

<comment><USER17> You obviously don't remember the 70s.

Do we have rubbish piling up on the streets, dead people piling up not being buried? Do we have rolling power cuts due to strikes? Are we all on a 3 day week? Massive inflation and interest rates?

The UK is turning the corner after the disastrous spend spend spend! Socialism of the last decade.

<comment><USER18> The disastrous spending of recent decades has been private spending funded by borrowing not public spending (although arguably the government should have tried to be more counter-cyclical than it was). The recovery happening at the moment is due to borrowing restarting and accelerating and is also the first steps towards the next crisis.

<comment><USER19> > (although arguably the government should have tried to be more counter- > cyclical than it was)

That's a very polite way of acknowledging that the UK government ran a massive deficit-funded spending campaign throughout one of the fattest and longest boom cycle in history.

<comment><USER18> Public borrowing was small compared to private borrowing, it would have been better to take action to limit bank lending to cool the housing market than to drastically cut public spending. And I don't think many political leaders would have borrowed much less, under the Tories I think both spending and taxes would have been lower which wouldn't have produced better results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I love the Mountain View burrowing owl reference. Here's a '96 usenet news article I posted about the endangered burrowing owls I would bike past every day in Mountain View. It just happened to be right where SGI was about to build their new HQ, and is now the heart of the Google campus. I had just moved to Silicon Valley from Canada when I posted this....

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.birds/vPvrRW_fVX...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.birds/vPvrRW_fVXE)

</comment><comment><USER21> I think this quote really nails the mentality in the city:

> As political scientist and longtime San Francisco observer Richard DeLeon > puts it:

 _San Francisco has emerged as a "semi-sovereign city" — a city that imposes as many limits on capital as capital imposes on it. Mislabeled by some detractors as socialist or radical in the Marxist tradition, San Francisco's progressivism is concerned with consumption more than production, residence more than workplace, meaning more than materialism, community empowerment more than class struggle. Its first priority is not revolution but protection — protection of the city's environment, architectural heritage, neighborhoods, diversity, and overall quality of life from the radical transformations of turbulent American capitalism._

<comment><USER22> > protection of the city's environment, architectural heritage, neighborhoods, > diversity, and overall quality of life from the radical transformations of > turbulent American capitalism

...and ironically creating some of America's highest market rents in the process.

<comment><USER21> Sure it's semi-ridiculous to frame this in terms of left "progressivism", especially as the waterfront battles are being fought by rich people who live in skyscrapers who do not want other skyscrapers blocking their views.

But I think the sentiment is broadly popular because it gets the heart of why people fall in love with San Francisco. It's not just the community (whatever community), it's the housing stock, the 'perfect' density, the hills, the views, the shops and restaurants, the smell of the air. That's what makes San Francisco San Francisco. One hundred years ago, Los Angeles looked a lot like SF. But they replaced 90% of the victorians, they flattened the hills, they built freeways everywhere. San Francisco was spared that, largely because the people fought back, and now the people want to fight to preserve what was saved.

I'm of mixed-feelings about it. The Bay Guardian always warns of "Manhattanization", but the alternative endpoint is turning into a huge version of Carmel By The Sea.

<comment><USER16> "...the smell of the air".

Ok, I live in Europe, but I was under the impression that SF had a bit of a smog problem.

<comment><USER23> The air in SF is very clean. The prevailing winds come from the very-wide pacific ocean and blow all the pollution across the Bay into Oakland and Berkeley.

It does however have a _fog_ problem, because those nice clean prevailing winds are quite cold and moisture condenses rise when encountering the hills along the coast. This is in fact the major source of water for the coastal giant sequoias.

"Coast redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) are distributed along a narrow band of California's northern coast. During the summer these red giants take advantage of the fog to capture water out of the air—and summer is the critical growing season for the trees, despite being California's dry season."

[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fog-that- nourishes...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fog-that-nourishes- california-redwoods-declining/)

<comment><USER24> Giant redwoods? I thought Giant sequoias grown in the Sierra nevada.

<comment><USER25> giant redwoods = coast redwoods = sequoia sempervirens

Giant Redwoods = Giant Sequioa = sequoiadendron gigantium

<comment><USER24> I assume the case difference is just typing and not some sort of case- sensitivity in taxonomy.

Seems like there is some imprecise naming going on which is why I wasn't sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> For another great take on the housing crisis in SF and elsewhere, I recommend a book that I first heard about on Hacker News, Matt Yglesias's The Rent is Too Damn High: [http://www.amazon.com/The-Rent-Too-Damn-High- ebook/dp/B0078X...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Rent-Too-Damn-High- ebook/dp/B0078XGJXO)

The over-regulation of home building by cities is an issue not really on the public's radar, unfortunately.

<comment><USER27> Well, the 30-70% of population that are homeowners do have homebuilding on their radar - they're investors in the housing stock and have an incentive to cap/limit supply.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> > _Today, the tech industry is apparently on track to destroy one of the > world's most valuable cultural treasures, San Francisco, by pushing out the > diverse people who have helped create it. At least that's the story you've > read in hundreds of articles lately._

> _It doesn't have to be this way. But everyone who lives in the Bay Area > today needs to accept responsibility for making changes where they live so > that everyone who wants to be here, can._

I don't know if drastically changing the housing landscape of SF will destroy the culture that made everyone want into the city in the first place, but asserting that it won't is just as tenuous as asserting it will.

All I ever see is rationalization that it won't, because the tech community takes it as axiomatic that they must pile into the city. By debating the conclusion we are tricked into accepting the form.

For example: "But everyone who lives in the Bay Area today needs to accept responsibility for making changes"

That's a lot of people. Including ones hostile to your goals. You would need to get a smaller and friendlier set of people on board to make a slightly-more geographically disperse tech scene work in the Bay Area. The self-fulfilling business "common sense" about SF is much more _momentum_ than _sense_.

</comment><comment><USER29> I think that SF's proud antiquity is coming back to bite it. The older generations fought against development for decades, now the demand for property is so high they can't afford to live here anymore.

</comment><comment><USER30> That was a very long but very good article.

I still don't get protests over evictions or for rent control. They are literally forcing the landlord to subsidize their cost of living. But why make only landlords pay for the subsidy? Why not tax everyone? I'm ok with income redistribution, but not when it is done so inefficiently and at the expense of a specific group.

<comment><USER31> Because the landlords did their building in 1970 or earlier when building costs were cheaper, or bought the property rent-controls considered. The article also points out the drastic cut to property taxes a while back, from which savings generally didn't get passed on to tenants.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> One thing the article doesnt really touch on is how rent control, as well as San Francisco's many other pro-tenant laws, actually incentivizes landlords to keep rental units off the market. It's basically impossible to evict bad tenants in San Francisco for reasons other than non-payment of rent. I'm not a real estate lawyer, but my impression is it can take years and tons of legal fees to get a bad tenant out, even for reasons that in most other cities would be easy cause for eviction.

I personally know a lot of mom-and-pop landlords with vacant rental units who cant be bothered to rent them, because dealing with bad tenants in SF is such a pain. These are middle-class people who bought multiple-unit buildings 20 or 30 years ago when it was affordable and dont need the rental income, and dont want the hassle. I would guess that there are thousands of units like this across the city.

<comment><USER33> More anecdata.

If I had a dollar for every time I've heard this one. I refuse to believe that professional landlords are keeping units off the market when the current rental market may well represent the top of what they can get for the next 5 years. Most of the long term landlords who bought 20-30 years ago have gone through at least 3 down markets from the late 80s to now. The current employment gold rush in SF is just that, and I suspect long term owners recognize that and want to strike while the iron is hot.

I am willing to change my opinion if anyone could provide any tangible data, but I only see this argument bandied about with no actual proof.

So in my rebuttal, I would say that I guess that there are less than 100 units like that across the city. I have no proof, but I _feel_ thats the case, therefore rent control not bad. See how that works?

<comment><USER32> If you're hearing it a lot, then perhaps there might be some truth to it? You can refuse to believe whatever you want though.

I agree I'd like to see a real study about this, but yeah anecdotal evidence is all I've got.

I know of at least 4 landlords like this, and the set of people who I know is an extremely limited sample size. How many you encounter probably correlates to how many homeowners over the age of 60 you know. These are people who have already paid off their buildings, which is usually also their home, and have decided that the potential income stream is just not worth the hassle of renting out their extra units and potentially getting bad tenants. Especially if they have been vacant a long time and would need some sprucing up to put on the market. They are retired and comfortable as it is and just dont want to deal with it. Better to just use that unit as storage or an occasional guest house for family or whatever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Just pack up and leave the damn place already.

Sorry to be blunt, but that's how "supply and demand" is _really_ supposed to work. If Seattle supplies the same quality of housing for half the cost of San Francisco, buyers/renters should flock to Seattle, thereby reducing demand in SF and eventually causing SF housing prices to come down until the market finds an equilibrium. Trying to lobby for "below-market-price" housing is always going to be a losing game; the only long-term solution is to make the market price lower.

Unfortunately, competition among cities to attract residents is not like competition in other industries. A lot of people are stuck in a relatively small geographical area their whole lives due to employment, their children's education, various kinds of emotional attachment, and the sheer difficulty of uprooting themselves from a familiar neighborhood. This creates a captive market, severely limiting the effectiveness of inter-city competition. And of course, whenever there's a captive market, there's somebody who profits from it. In the case of SF's housing market, entrenched neighborhood groups and "below-market-price" renters enjoy benefits at the expense of newcomers to the city. Perhaps they actually deserve those benefits. Still, it's unfair to everyone else.

But there's one group of people who can afford not to be bound by the usual excuses that keep people stuck in a captive market. That's us, the techies. We don't need to be in any particular city in order to write code. Most of us are young and don't have kids. Few of us have any "root" in the Bay Area, so we couldn't care less about being uprooted [1]. There is no reason for us to be a part of San Fran's captive housing market. We can pack up and leave, all 8% of us if possible. That would be "supply and demand" doing its work.

Of course, there are a few problems with this proposal, including the fact that there really is such a thing as social networking of the offline kind. The Bay Area undoubtedly has one of the best tech "scenes" in the world. But I see it as a problem that needs to be fixed, not merely an advantage that we're free to exploit. HN, for example, requires everyone to move to the Bay Area, perhaps for a good reason. But in doing so, they directly contribute to, and exacerbate, the hideous distortion of the Bay Area's housing market. It's like mandating that everyone meet at a particular Starbucks. It makes sense when everyone you want to meet is already a regular of that Starbucks, but when the manager of Starbucks begins to take advantage of its captive clientele, you should seriously start considering an alternative.

Remember, the only vote that the market respects is a vote with your feet, i.e. a realistic threat to do business with a competitor.

[1] Disclaimer: I've lived in at least seven different cities in three continents, and harbor no particular emotional attachment to any of them. Apparently I'm incapable of developing an emotional attachment to geographical coordinates. But I must confess that I kinda like it that way.

<comment><USER35> The reason to live in SF is to take part in its vibrant culture. That's why people live there and take the busses to the boring parts of the peninsula.

There is high demand for what the city offers.

There's also high demand for face-to-face meetings with people to assess and establish trust. There is no replacement for that, and why experience tends to cluster together, whether tech here, or entertainment in the South.

<comment><USER36> I live in Santa Clara, but I still get to access the city's culture on weekends -- music, theater, cuisine, et al. Many techies don't even get off their shuttles until 7pm or more, so I wonder how many actually partake in the local culture on weekdays, and how many eat and then sleep.

I suppose if you're in your 20s and without children, it makes a bigger difference, but I find I don't often have the time to do anything until the weekend anyway, and so there would be little use paying high rents when 60% of the time, I'm just crashing there and spending all my time elsewhere.

<comment><USER37> The Caltrain stops at midnight though. Make sure you don't have too much fun and stay out late or else you'll miss your transportation back. Driving is too unsafe and gets tiring as well due to distance and parking. Somehow, the majority of residents in the bay area are okay with this the status quo.

<comment><USER38> We're not okay with it. We just have to put up with it because the entire system is ridiculous. Seems like ridesharing services are one of the ways we've attempted to deal with it. I can envision in the future private weekend shuttles that ferry partygoers from S.F. to other places, so people don't have to deal with the terrible parking situation in the city, and the fact that BART and Caltrain stop far too early.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> As a 12 year plus SF Resident, married to a native San Franciscan, who has both rented and now owns property, and who follows local politics closely; I can report this is one of the most complete, articulate, and accurate summaries of the situation I've ever read.

Please encourage others to read this.

</comment><comment><USER40> "... one of the world's most valuable cultural treasures, San Francisco..." \- oh, Americans :).

</comment><comment><USER41> Finally, an article on the situation that puts an accurate (i.e. large) amount of the blame on the cities of the peninsula and south bay.

Also, prop 13 is the worst thing ever. Reading that section was really depressing.

</comment><comment><USER42> I haven't finished reading all the comments, but here's my take on the article:

Great for mentioning the prop13-rentcontrol duality, a lot of people conveniently forget one side or the other.

Great for delving into the politics of it all, including the neighborhood associations.

Not-so-great: it was touched on but not really elaborated: why the peninsula (Palo Alto, Mountain View, Cupertino, the heart of SV) are not densifying to provide housing for the corporations they have. Some of the downtowns are very desireable, but still full of single-family homes. Some of the commercial space could be built up with housing over the businesses, and then these towns would develop even more character. I think the tech industry got a free-ride (heh) in building huge campuses in towns that have little residential growth (and even the towns' resistance to growth is mentioned). Google, Apple, etc, should be pushing on Mountain View to build 10,000 residential unites in the area. It's happening a tiny bit, but not nearly as fast as the companies are expanding.

Most people don't choose 1-hour 40-mile commutes if they can avoid them. But the corporate buses make that commute feasible. I actually wonder if bus transport is reported by the employees as income for taxation purposes, and if not why?

Finally, this issue really seems to stem from regional politics. SF has to compete with suburbs on tax breaks to companies, yet the suburbs can offload all the residential problems to the city. Seems like there should be state- wide rules that make this fairer.

<comment><USER43> People are choosing the 1 hour 40 mile commutes because they want to be hip and live in SF. It's going to be decade+ before the valley is hip. If you're earning 150K plus, do you really want to live on campus? Yikes. No, you are a young, urban professional that wants to dine, go to the theatre, and socialize at expensive bars on the weekends.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> One of the things the article addresses is the fact that other communities need to build affordable housing, not just SF.

I for one am going to speak to some local political figures. If you live in any city in the SF bay area, you may as well do the same. Write a letter. Express your interest in the creation of apartments in the city. Because if you build housing in the area, people will live there.

<comment><USER45> Almost every city in the Bay Area has a range of affordable housing programs - from public housing to income restricted rentals and ownership opportunities to rental and purchase assistance programs. Some are federal, some state, some local and many are operated by non-profits.

Just search for the city and "affordable housing".

<comment><USER44> And yet rents continued to climb, even between the dotcom bubble and the recent boom, when there was a downturn. plus many programs have a gap between abject poverty and the working poor/lower middle class americans.

Lower rents and increased availability benefit almost everybody.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> A great companion to Cutler's piece (which is excellent in its depth and analysis) is Andreas Schou's G+ post "So, why is Silicon Valley studded with an implausibly large number of abandoned barns, shacks, and other things that don't look like they belong here?":

[https://plus.google.com/112482032780181267192/posts/FLUkbf4k...](https://plus.google.com/112482032780181267192/posts/FLUkbf4kdDN)

This details a great many seemingly illogical (but actually financially sensible) consequences of California's 1978 property "tax reform" measure, Proposition 13.

Schou (recently hired by Google) is among the brightest lights on G+ in my experience. Much as I try to avoid the site, he draws me back at least to look.

</comment><comment><USER47> "one of the world's most valuable cultural treasures" Travel much outside of the US?

</comment><comment><USER48> I think building more upscale condos/housing will attract even more money, and there will be a positive feedback loop, so the housing will become even more expensive. This can be observed in Manhattan.

<comment><USER49> Downvotes for this are unwarranted. This is a plausible mechanism, even if it's wrong, and should be engaged with.

The key thing is the margin for "even more expensive". Fundamentally, yes, development makes cities more valuable / expensive, _in aggregate_ (after all, that's why cities exist in the first place). The key thing is how many units that value is spread out over. If you tear down a slum and replace it with $1M condos in a supply-constrained market, rents will rise.

But, there are a limited number of people who can afford to buy 7-figure condos, and it is possible to build enough housing to saturate that demand all the way down the curve. If you're actually able to tear down a single-family unit and replace it with 4-unit low-rise apartments, and rent / sell them at a decent price since people want to move into the city, and _all your competitor landlords can do the same_ , you'll see more units, more total dollars going to landlords, and lower prices per unit.

The key thing is to make it cheap to build. Excessive regulation of the kind the article talks about often does the exact opposite - they make it so you can build, eventually, but it's only worthwhile if you can be sure of extracting large rents. Even worse, the high value of land & rent in a supply- constrained environment puts a lot of vested interests in keeping supply low, in a vicious circle.

A sure sign you're trapped in that vicious circle is if developers have "community engagement" and "affordable housing" dollars to throw around.

<comment><USER50> > But, there are a limited number of people who can afford to buy 7-figure > condos

Of course, but if the total possible supply of 7-figure condos in SF is smaller than the total number of people who want to buy 7-figure condos in SF, then it would indeed be possible to fill the city with nothing but 7-figure condos and have thusly dramatically increased the price of housing!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> A lot of the tech employees that are being protested are young, single, and much more willing to move for economic reasons than families. The ability to buy a house in the future, not deal with protesters, and probably make more money overall in a city with lower rents is pretty enticing. Silicon Valley has a lot of tech companies, but now Seattle and Austin do too- not as many, but growing. At some point the hatred misdirected at tech employees could result in San Francisco suffering from less tech investment than other more stable cities.

</comment><comment><USER52> I feel privileged to be mentioned as the homeless guy who was living on a couch at the end of the article :)

</comment><comment><USER53> I wonder if SF could experience some tech detroitification in about 10-20 years, or possibly sooner.

As a tech worker here, I and others engineers I know are becoming disenfranchised with the housing prices around here to the point that I'm casually exploring where I might want to move next in 4 years or so if this situation doesn't reverse itself.

With the number of engineers all feeling the same, it's possible to find enough people to willing to be a co-founder and move to a much cheaper part of the world during the formative months/years when your company is pre-profit. Take Silicon Valley investing connections, a mobile workforce, rising housing prices and you basically have a confluence of forces that will accelerate a diaspora of engineers to more places in the world without necessarily giving up on the tech community that makes SF so desirable. Once decent sizeable tech communities show up in more places, the greater the likelihood that engineers in the Bay Area look around and tell themselves "This just isn't worth it. I'm paying a premium to be around colleagues, but now my colleagues are everywhere and it's just not worth it anymore."

At the end of the day every engineer without rent control is going to face a financial decision once a year when rents are raised that could make moving elsewhere more attractive. What's the point of improving at your job and earning raises when most of your raise ends up going into your landlord's pocket. Do that 2-3 times and you are either going to look into someway of getting into rent control unit or you're going to start considering other options elsewhere.

All you really need to stay in the area for is to create a solid enough professional network that you'll gain access to the smart capital in the region. Once you have that, you can go anywhere since investors will know you, what you're capable of and that investing in you and your business is a good idea. If this happens often enough, you're going to start to see more VCs comfortable with this approach that they'll be able to tell offer job candidates coming through the VC hiring offices positions in portfolio companies located in places that might be more desirable to a tech worker than SF.

I stay in SF because some of the most interesting tech jobs are here. Once that is no longer a valid assumption and my professional network is sufficiently geographically distributed, I no longer have anything tying me solely to San Francisco.

I can't count the number of conversations I've had with other engineers about thinking about moving to Berlin or Portland or even trying to set up shop in some cheap remote paradise where we would have the financial liberty to invite friends to come out and hang out in a guest room for weeks to months at a time so long as they pay the airfare and living arrangements. Top places on my list when I entertain ideas like this are small beach towns along the Northeast of Brazil. I'm often amazed at how many of my engineer friends are onboard with this ideas, more than willing to exchange San Francisco so long as they know they will have engineering peers and interesting engineering problems to solve in some other locale.

Even the cultural attractions that made San Francisco awesome have been co- opted by the hipster culture and gone mainstream enough that SF no longer has the strong lead on novel cultural innovations that it once had.

        "It's an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be
        seen in San Francisco. It must be a delightful city and
        possess all the attractions of the next world"

        -- Oscar Wilde

All the attractions of the next world are starting to crop up everywhere more and more and here in SF less and less. Eventually the barrier to going elsewhere and still working on fun engineering problems will be easily surmountable.

<comment><USER54> I think what you will see is not a "detroitification", but a seeding, where every important city in the world has some footprint in software. Detroit's problem was it was a single industry: automobiles. Software is now all industries. This is such a relevant topic, where as in the past migration was triggered by where the jobs where, now an individual (typically unmarried and without children) can choose where to go based almost just on quality of life.

There are some very interesting concepts around what you are talking about:

What are the most desirable places to live?

Are there cities that are somewhat broken that could fixed?

Are there cities that are totally broken that could flourish?

Should we take cities that will survive massive climate change more seriously than those that will vanish beneath the ocean?

How critical is the cities' level of individual freedom?

Then there are questions regarding software and technology's impact on the very nature of the city -

Will better remote work diminish the networking advantages of a place like NYC or SF?

Will self-driving cars spread cities out?

Will people if want to live in a densely populated area after all of these changes?

<comment><USER53> Most cities are broken IMHO since they value automobiles over people. I want to see more cities that put the commons where you actually can interact with others first and foremost:

        * walking and biking are valued over cars
        * vehicles within city limits are only used for delivery of goods.
        * instead of a network of roads, we have a network of greenspaces[0]
        * more plazas and parks (Medellin has done a pretty good job here)
        * one massive park in the center of the city (e.g. NYC and Munchen)
        * located where precipitation is not a problem
        * cars are only for inter-city travel and stay outside the city (Freiburg)
        * Lots of sports in the city (Rio de Janeiro and Sydney, Australia)
        * People that need to move bulky things often live/work at the city periphery.

[0] This idea taken to its logical conclusion: [http://www.cidadedemocratica.org.br/topico/2755-ecos-na- pais...](http://www.cidadedemocratica.org.br/topico/2755-ecos-na-paisagem)

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_car- free_places](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_car-free_places)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Am I the only one who thought 6,000 new homes was an extremely low number?

Maybe. Here in Toronto, we've had a rough average of 35,000 new homes each year. I'm used to seeing new buildings and cranes all over town. It's not a boom town, but I've yet to hear of a shortage either...

And Toronto's population is roughly 3.1x that of San Francisco, but it's held steady for roughly the last decade at least. 35/6 is 5.8x less, and given the population growth in SF, the number of new builds should be at least double; 12k perhaps.

Equally funny, Toronto also had a freeway revolt and succeeded. So we have a relatively livable downtown, plus growth. Go figure. Some corridors in Toronto are nothing but skyscrapers. Height restrictions do exist, but are raised on a case-by-case basis (e.g. public art, parks can help negotiate). Even areas that fought expressways, while mostly single-dwelling, have allowed high rises along nearby major streets.

That said, we're still trying to make plans to destroy the Gardiner Expressway, our Embarcadero it seems.

<comment><USER56> Y'all got this to balance out NIMBYs: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Municipal_Board](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Municipal_Board)

Do you know what kinds of stories you never hear in California: "the OMB, against the City's wishes, approved development of a condominium/townhouse complex near a low-density residential area immediately west of North York Centre."

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> This is the best TechCrunch article ever written. I wish they let their journalist spend more time doing well researched pieces like this.

</comment><comment><USER58> _" But in places where zoning regulations create artificial limits on home production, the final prices to home buyers jump far above construction costs. In the 1980s and 1990s, they found that virtually all of San Francisco's home prices were at least 140 percent above base construction costs."_

The papers she's citing here _exclude apartments_ from the analysis. They're talking about single-family homes:

[http://www.nber.org/papers/w8835.pdf](http://www.nber.org/papers/w8835.pdf)

 _" The housing price data used in this paper to create the relationship between home prices and construction cost comes from the American Housing Survey (AHS). We focus on observations of single unit residences that are owner occupied, and exclude condominiums and cooperative units in buildings with multiple units even if they are owned"_

Probably not incredibly relevant to a discussion of rental prices.

</comment><comment><USER59> [http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf- housing/](http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/)

>The true culprit behind our housing problems: let us deflect blame to Mountain View's burrowing owl!

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoreline_Park,_Mountain_View](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoreline_Park,_Mountain_View)

>City of Mountain View evicted a pair of burrowing owls so that it could sell a parcel of land to Google to build a hotel at Shoreline Boulevard and Charleston Road.

...wtf?

</comment><comment><USER60> SF Housing Crisis Explained: Money allows one to buy things that other people (sometimes even people poorer than oneself) might have wanted to buy themselves. From this, two things follow: (1) we should redistribute money so that the very poor can at least buy something, and (2) nerds shouldn't be allowed to have much money, since no one likes them, and so why should they be allowed to buy things that other people want to buy.

</comment><comment><USER61> The whole thing is ludicrous. Why can't tech workers work from home, from anywhere in the world?

<comment><USER62> Sometimes the fastest solution to a problem is to get everyone in a room with a whiteboard and deal with it. There are ways to collaborate online, but none are as efficient as person to person. Also not everyone has a good internet connection or home office condusive to working 8 hours a day. I'm not saying people can't work from home ever, just that its not practical for the vast majority.

<comment><USER63> Sure, but you need 2-10 people no 30 000. You definitely make remote teams work from remote offices.

Also is the problem with executives in companies like Google. I believe a lot of them bought properties and they have no incentive to change the market dynamics. They working against company best interest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> And now, the KQED version of the article: [http://blogs.kqed.org/newsfix/2014/04/14/San-Franciscos- Curr...](http://blogs.kqed.org/newsfix/2014/04/14/San-Franciscos-Current-Boom- Repeats-an-Old-Story)

</comment><comment><USER65> Quite ironic how a blog constantly zooming in on the successes and ecosphere of the Valley attempt to explain the problem. The reason people are flocking to Silicon Valley is partially found in the overly-positive media reporting by Techcrunch and the like.

</comment><comment><USER66> $8,000 and month dollars for a two bedroom apartment, that is ridiculous. You could own several large house where I live. I am tired of hearing about these silly SV-SF problems. Build more and the problem will stop.

<comment><USER37> That's Mountain View and just the most desirable part of it. I live in the same city with rent below $1400 for a 1 bed/1 bath and just a 5 min drive from the same Caltrain station.

<comment><USER67> Where's your apartment and when did you sign your lease? I was just looking and couldn't find anything under about $1650, and that was older family-owned apartments in either the California/Escuela area or Shoreline/Wright area.

<comment><USER37> Actually California/Escuela area and signed about 1.5 years ago. On month-to- month with no rent increase since initially signing a 1-year lease.

<comment><USER67> I think you've lucked out in that your landlord hasn't bothered to keep tabs on the current market. A year and a half ago $1400 was reasonable in the California/Escuela area; now, Craigslist shows a minimum of about $1700 for a 1BR, up to $2600 for 2BRs.

Enjoy it while it lasts; sometimes the smaller owner-operated apartments can be nice specifically because they don't raise rents as rapidly as the professionally-managed ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> it kinda make sense, why existing population of SF tries to oppose any new building, but I still can't understand why bigger companies need to be there physically except may be top managerial stuff? It still make sense to start startup there, since this city filled with like minded people, but for bigger companies - why pursue it? Me and quite a few of my (married and with children) friends refuse even considering moving to SF exactly for this reason - too inadequate housing situation.

</comment><comment><USER69> Very long story. Only halfway through the original referenced article, and I can tell the writer has some solid economics chops.

</comment><comment><USER70> This has a ton of great information and background but could definitely use some splitting up and organizing IMO. I don't know anybody but the most dedicated who could spend the hours it would take to digest this. It reads almost like a wikipedia page.

<comment><USER71> > _This has a ton of great information and background but could definitely use > some splitting up and organizing_

Page length issues seem to bother a lot of people.

I wrote a long one-page web article myself recently, and everybody said it was too long and needed to be split up and organized.

So I split the article at the section headings into separate web pages.

Everybody who had complained earlier said that my "reedit" was now much better. But really I didn't make any change other than splitting it into separate web pages.

Now, I do understand the value of paragraphs, spacing, and section headings. It's much easier visually. But I never understood the distaste for long web pages. (Obviously, it should be related material, like a story.)

It seems that some readers prefer 5 separate web pages (that must be read contiguously) rather than a single page with five section headings. Maybe I'm in the minority, but I prefer the single page.

<comment><USER72> I actually _did_ read through the entire article in one sitting, but to be honest I'm surprised I did. My time spent is usually too fractured to permit this long a focus on anything that isn't either work or passive entertainment.

I can see how one can become dependent on more episodic consumption, designed to give clear break points and bring one comfortably back into the context at a later point when ready to continue. Those crutches would be comforting even if one ends up "binging" on the entire piece anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> _Santa Clara Valley was some of the most valuable agricultural land in the entire world, but it was paved over to create today's Silicon Valley._

Exact same move the Maya pulled. At their tech level, that plus climate change ended their civilization.

</comment><comment><USER74> Item 7: Move to Raleigh, NC

</comment><comment><USER75> i find it interesting that there's always such willful disregard for analytical inclusion of los angeles, the 2nd largest city/metro in the US, with a housing market that dwarves all other metro areas but new york.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/15/business/more-renters- find...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/15/business/more-renters- find-30-affordability-ratio-unattainable.html?hp)

los angeles leads the nation in out-of-whack median rent/median income ratios. what does that suggest to me? that it's one of the last of the major US cities with poor and lower-middle class people living in it.

<comment><USER76> Important quote from that article:

"Increasing the supply is not going to increase the number of affordable units; that is a complete and utter fallacy," said Jaimie Ross, the president of the Florida Housing Coalition.

As the article explains, the reason is that builders are going to prefer to build "luxury" units to "affordable" ones. So having a whole bunch of construction is not necessarily going to lead to anything affordable. A construction boom may bring the high end rents down a little bit, but they'll still be out of reach of most people.

<comment><USER77> This is why the Free Market just doesn't fucking work.

The "invisible hand" just doesn't care about marginal actors. Who cares if there's people being displaced? Free markets!@#*(_!@)#

jesus I need a drink

<comment><USER78> And replace the free market with what? Communism? Where people like you try to show your brilliance at dictating how things "should be"? GTFO.

<comment><USER77> Reasonably regulated market where people are free to pursue economic opportunities but with oversight that protects the underclass and underprivileged?

<comment><USER78> We have a reasonably regulated market. What we don't have is a system where people get to live where they want to live without regards to what they can afford.

SF renters need to back up the U-Haul truck and find new places to live where they can afford it. They are not "entitled" to live in SF simply because they want to.

<comment><USER77> The problem is, you're asking people who've lived in a place for generations just to up and move because yuppies want easier access to bars and fancy coffee shops. Surely you can understand why this isn't so simple, I hope.

People who have roots are getting uprooted because they declined or couldn't get in on the sweet tech boom dollars. A lot of the locals are pissed.

I live in Brooklyn, and I live in a part of Brooklyn that really, if they figured out I worked in Tech, I wouldn't be shocked if they showed up with torches and pitchforks as a warning to others.

<comment><USER78> I understand the problem. I just don't give it any validity. The renters think their wishes and desires to live in a specific area are more important than other people who wish to live in that same area. It comes across as immature and whining.

It's not just renting. It's income as well. There are lots of folks whining about how others make more money and how that "isn't fair". It's a broad theme of people complaining and having a sense of entitlement.

<comment><USER77> you don't think it's unfair that a landlord can upend your life and make it complete hell just so they can get tenants who are willing to pay more?

This isn't about moving, this is about completely changing lives. How to get to work, who's in the neighborhood, what's the neighborhood flavor like... it's more than just "living in a specific area" it's about living life.

Income inequality is another issue all together. No, it's not fair that a fast food joint has the guys who flip burgers and run the cash register do all the work and get literally the least amount of money the business can legally give them. And yes, they could just go look for other jobs... if there were any. In a lot of places, there just isn't other work. For others, their particular field may have been decimated. A friend of mine was a bar certified lawyer in corporate finance. ... when he graduated in 2008.

Yeah. life isn't fair, and maybe part of it is roughing it. But another part of it is also recognizing that the system has been inadvertently rigged towards the relatively wealthy and hyper wealthy.

There's reasons why there are protests in the streets of the Bay Area, and tone deaf responses like this are one of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> > parts of the progressive community do not believe in supply and demand

Wow, those left wing progressives must really be crazy. It's not like tech CEO's would ever say there is a shortage of good technicians. They obviously believe in supply and demand, and that if demand, salary, working conditions and long-term career viability were good enough, the supply would arise.

</comment><comment><USER80> TLDR "Stupidity combined with an unwarranted trust in government to over-ride reality".

</comment><comment><USER81> tl;dr poor people don't want to be forced out of their homes or have their affordable local businesses shut down, and rich people want to make/keep a lot of money (partly by pushing poor people out of their homes and closing their affordable local businesses)

From my perspective SF does not have a housing crisis. They quite obviously have a culture crisis. Two opposed socioeconomic groups are at war, each trying to push the other out of the city. Housing remains plentiful, though obviously not affordable. You want to make housing really affordable? Introduce a large drug trade and a couple dozen gangs to bring up the mortality and crime rates, and you'll see those housing prices rocket downwards.

If you would rather live in a city with plentiful, affordable housing - 16% of which is abandoned or unliveable - come on over to my side of the country. You might want to bring a car and some pepper spray, though.

<comment><USER82> this tl;dr misses the import part: "Homeowners have a strong economic incentive to restrict supply".

<comment><USER81> What homeowner has a strong economic incentive to flood the market with more affordable housing, driving down the value of their own?

<comment><USER83> A homeowner who isn't planning on selling (or borrowing against the asset) anytime soon, and whose taxes move with the market price of housing.

<comment><USER56> Property taxes don't move in line with the market value of housing in California, unfortunately.

<comment><USER83> That's precisely the point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> > Sorry, this isn't a shorter post or that I didn't break it into 20 pieces.

Sorry, I didn't read it because you're a lazy writer who can't be bothered to consolidate the piece into a cohesive, easy-to-digest narrative. Oddly enough, I should be fish in a barrel, -- a mid 20s moving to SF for career; yet you couldn't take the time to work on maintaining my attention for more than a couple bullet points. The hilarious part is that you self-righteously reject that which you ultimately give in to, ("sorry [...] that I didn't break it into 20 pieces") presumably under the continuing theme of "look at me for being better at not being better than people."

So yeah, sorry I didn't read. Let me know how your blog post does.

</comment><comment><USER85> I wonder what would have happened to the "Yuppie Eradication" project had the owners of said vehicles possessed defensive means such as firearms.

</comment><comment><USER86> Can somebody give me a perspective on how much they pay for housing ? I did a quick craigslist search expecting studios to be 2500 a month but it only took me a minute to find a very reasonable 950 A month studio apt.

[https://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/apa/4423411641.html](https://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/apa/4423411641.html)

<comment><USER87> That's because you're way out on the edge of the city in a commuter ghetto and by the looks of it you'd still be paying more than $2/SF to live in squalor (that unit is a dump, sorry). I apologize for the negativity but no one should be paying that much to commute without a nice spec (floors, kitchen and bath). You deserve better than that kitchen.

<comment><USER86> You're not being negative. I'm just trying to understand the extent of the problem. I'm a student, and I've lived in worse than that for about $820. (It was right next to campus).

According to google maps, this was about 10 minutes away from the heart of San Francisco (when there was no traffic). I'm guessing google doesn't paint the whole picture, and it really is as far as you say it is.

Personally, if I had gotten a job in downtown SF with 6 figures, and no family, I'd have no problem living there and saving up. It doesn't look THAT bad does it? It's even got an outside area. Just my opinion though.

<comment><USER88> I lived a block away from that apartment. Note 2 things - theres only 2 or 3 of those available in the entire city (and you have to compete for them), you will have a slumlord-style landlord who won't tolerate any noise or usually a single guest, your fixtures won't work, there will be stabbings and shootings within a block of you (not west/east oakland, but enough to have to be careful at night).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER89> HN, tell me why this wouldn't work: tax anyone renting an old property (i.e. built more than 15 years ago) for 50% of the difference between the rent now & before the tech boom. Put this to subsidise development of affordable housing in under-developed areas like SOMA.

Really, the lowest hanging fruit is just building reasonable transport through the whole city. At the moment it seems like only 30-40% of SF is actually being used. Demolishing freeways & replacing them with housing would not be a bad area either. Smaller houses, like the ones in European cities, would help a lot as well.

<comment><USER10> Because there are way too many people exploiting the existing system; even if such a change were enacted, it would be immediately overturned via ballot proposition. Remember not just Prop 13, but also Gray Davis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> _" But this paper conflates correlation with causation. He argues that when there is a decline in new housing units, there is also a decline in price."_

I knew this was going to happen: people have heard a trite sound-bite about "counter-intuitive" statistical logic so many times that they ignore that correlation is usually a pretty damned good signal for a causal relationship.

To wit: of _course_ there's a correlation between price and new housing units -- because _it is causally related_. When prices go up, developers have greater incentives to build. More importantly, in a city with as high a density as San Francisco (and yes, folks, it _is_ dense -- the second-densest city in the US, in fact), with as many architectural challenges (seismic, geographic, etc.) the limiting factor for new construction is land and materials, not red tape.

Nobody wants to hear this, but it's true. The fixed costs of building here are so high that developers won't do it unless rents go up. That's why new construction costs upwards of $4k for a 1-bedroom unit, and why new construction in SF doesn't place any real downward pressure on rents -- except (perhaps) in the very long term. At best, you're treading water. Developers don't build into a falling market.

But really, the best response for the people who keep asserting that "building up" is the magical solution is to point to Manhattan: it's the densest city in America, yet it's just as expensive as San Francisco, if not more so.

There are no magic bullets. San Francisco is expensive because there's a lot of money chasing a tiny little bit of land. You don't need a dissertation to explain it.

<comment><USER90> > with as many architectural challenges (seismic, geographic, etc.) the > limiting factor for new construction is land and materials, not red tape

Are you kidding me? There are plenty of other cities in seismically active regions where they've built upwards with great success. All of you people who blame earthquakes for SF's inability to build upwards should put your money where your mouth is and get rid of all the red tape - then we'll see what really happens.

> But really, the best response for the people who keep asserting that > "building up" is the magical solution is to point to Manhattan: it's the > densest city in America, yet it's just as expensive as San Francisco, if not > more so.

Wow, how is it that so many people forget basic economics whenever the topic of Bay Area housing comes up? Prices demand both on supply and _demand_. You are making the (false) assumption that demand is the same in SF and Manhattan.

<comment><USER10> _> There are plenty of other cities in seismically active regions where they've built upwards with great success_

For example, Tokyo.

<comment><USER58> ...and the last time I checked, Tokyo real estate is amongst the most expensive in the world. Which was my point.

<comment><USER10> Oh, I thought your point was what you actually wrote:

 _> with as many architectural challenges (seismic, geographic, etc.) the limiting factor for new construction is land and materials, not red tape_</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dawn of a Revolution (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2013/09/dawn-of-a-revolution

<comment><USER3> The man is a visionary who - like Moses coming down from the mountain - <USER2> handed introduced desktop computing to the world. /s</comment>


How we designed the software for the Brex rewards platform - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/brexeng/building-a-rewards-platform-from-scratch-ff4e22124658 <comment><AUTHOR> Pedro here, co-founder of Brex (YC W'17, [https://brex.com/](https://brex.com/)) writing about a major product update. In June 2018 we first shared with the HN community the launch of our corporate card for startups. Here's our first post: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17418813](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17418813)

Just as we built our underwriting and issuing platform from scratch, we built our rewards platform internally, rather than use third-party software that typically comes as a module within existing bank industry softwares.

I have outlined the technical details of what we built in this blogpost. Would love to hear some feedback from the HN community :)

<comment><USER2> I have been seeing billboards for Brex on my way to or back from US101, saying BrexIt. Always caught my eye, making me think it must make SEO pretty hard. :)

Either way, good luck. Looks like a good platform.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! :)</comment></comment></comment>


CSS Utility Classes and "Separation of Concerns" - <AUTHOR> https://adamwathan.me/css-utility-classes-and-separation-of-concerns/ <comment><USER2> I think every project I've worked on has turned into a heap of CSS, constantly piling on itself.

I'll bet that's something you see on relatively small teams, until a business or team grows enough to dedicate people to working on design/css (where the quality/reusability of the CSS can be a forethought instead of an afterthought).</comment>


Codespaces.com taken down by hackers - <AUTHOR> http://www.codespaces.com/ <comment><USER2> From the page: "Code Spaces will not be able to operate beyond this point, the cost of resolving this issue to date and the expected cost of refunding customers who have been left without the service they paid for will put Code Spaces in a irreversible position both financially and in terms of on going credibility."

<comment><AUTHOR> The startup I freelance for just lost all of their subversion history and I assume all of their source code has been compromised, including backups of SQL databases we use for deployment. Inside job?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This sucks, but it's also a great case study for future review.

</comment><comment><USER4> everything about this sounds really shady. i have a reqlly hard time believing that they were stupid enough to let their entire company get wiped in less than 12 hours

</comment><comment><USER5> How can we help these guys?</comment>


TV-B-Gone for the Arduino - <AUTHOR> http://arcfn.com/2009/12/tv-b-gone-for-arduino.html

<comment><USER2> Neat-o. This would be an appropriate platform for a time-delay repeating or remote-controlled TV-B-Gone. I've thought about how I could mod my original TV-B-Gone to do that.

I really like my TV-B-Gone. I've given several of them as birthday presents to the children of friends. They appeal to the ten-year-old boy sense of mischievousness while subtly conveying the idea that mindless television is a bad thing.

<comment><USER3> But yet dictating to others in public how they should be entertained is a good thing?

<comment><USER2> You make a good point. But having televisions running all of the time in a room already IS dictating to everyone present what they have to pay attention to. It's a little like cigarette smoking - if everyone (or the vast majority) of people in a room are smoking or watching a TV then I would just put up with it or leave the room. But if I'm in there by myself or with a few other people who aren't watching the TV, e.g. a car dealership waiting room, as happened recently, the TV-B-Gone is rather handy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My TV-B-Gone kit just arrived in the mail. Ladyada rocks.

</comment><comment><USER5> what's also neat is making "glasses" that display all tv's as off by refreshing at the appropriate rate.

<comment><USER6> I don't get it.

<comment><USER7> LCD glasses that flicker transparent and opaque directly out of phase with the TV signal, so you only see the TV at times when it is between screen refreshes.

Not gonna work on LCD screens, methinks.</comment></comment></comment>


AngularJS from an Ember.js perspective - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/a/tomdale.net/presentation/d/1e0z1pT9JuEh8G5DOtib6XFDHK0GUFtrZrU3IfxJynaA/preview <comment><USER3> This is the only intelligent comparison I have seen of Ember & Angular (or actually of Angular with any other modern framework). Thanks!

I am wondering if the uniform access principle is mostly a dynamic language issue: you end up screwing up whether you need a parentheses invocation and you don't know until runtime. If you type everything with TypeScript then you know at compile time if you messed it up. Relatedly, Ember's get/set is more difficult to make strongly typed. In the TypeScript definitions I am looking at, property access is only typed as a string. One could define an enum for each object to be used in place of the string, but overall there is a price to pay with set/get since it isn't baked into the language (like Ruby).

<comment><USER4> I think the uniform access principle is misguided (or at least misconstrued). It's a bad idea... in general. If you're building an API and you have need some kind of stable, unchanging interface to expose - then it makes sense.

But people are using it everywhere in their programs; and it's not really valid there. First of all, data-access is _fast_ and computed functions may be slow. Hiding this difference means that writing efficient code becomes more tiresome - you need to consider each and every access as potentially expensive, even though the majority are probably trivial. This means you need to know the code better to get anywhere. And if you make it hard to write efficient code, people won't bother (and rightly so, since that's usually premature optimization).

Secondly, in most languages, simple data access is side-effect free and (usually) thread-safe or at least has predictable threading behavior. Managing side-effects - even without threading - is a major pain in any large code base, and although functional purity can be enforced otherwise in some languages, in most cases you've got nothing to go on. Making your life more difficult by discarding annotations that distinguish between method calls and member access isn't helping.

Of course, in a dynamic languages you're in a tricky spot here - it's hard to refactor, so exposing member access is something that's more work to change later when you discover you need computation or a side effect. However, even so; making a system harder to reason about for the purpose of a fairly pointless architectural purity is usually a bad idea.

The uniform access principle as applied to interfaces is another story; but in general use - I think it sounds nice in theory, but works poorly in practice.

<comment><USER5> JavaScript hasn't had simple data access for a long time if ever. Computed properties have been widely supported for a long time, there's "watch" [1], and of course there's the prototype chain. ES6 adds proxies, which makes practically everything you might want to do with an object potentially have custom behavior. IMHO, in JavaScript you might as well respect the uniform access principle, since "a.b" meaning simple data access has arguably never existed.

[1]: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Object/watch)

<comment><USER4> Since code could be self-modifying; clearly simple-data access has never been a guarrantee.

But in practice, today as ever, it's a good guideline. When you see an accessor, it will almost always be fast and side-effect free.

Now, part of that is because not all browsers support the features you refer to and therefor these features just don't get used much. But even in languages like C# and python, that have had real accessors for a long time, it's still a good guideline: it's generally considered bad practice to make a slow, side- effectful accessor, and most people don't.

Controlling side effects and performance are important, and the uniform access principle has little upside in most non-public code, yet considerable cost in that it obscures one of the few indicators mainstream languages have for these aspects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Having just dug into Angular while wondering if I really wanted to be working with Ember, this was a great comparison. It's obvious to me now I have to look at both frameworks. While done by an Ember.js creator I found the presentation also provided me with a much deeper knowledge of Angular at the same time - well done.

As for the Google popularity, one could snidely remark that Angular's documentation and taxonomy requires significant amounts of searching to solve the problems you are after. While the community is active, it's quite difficult to find examples of the right solution or effective documentation for newbies at times.

<comment><USER7> I just added this to the slides (ran out of time to prepare/say all the things I wanted to), related to Google popularity:

\- A toolset's mindshare is predictably going to be greater than that of a framework

\- Angular interest (per Google) dwarfs Ember; jQuery interest dwarfs Angular, etc

\- Angular encourages you to build the framework; Ember is the framework

<comment><USER8> What do you mean "Angular encourages you to build the framework"? What kind of framework?

<comment><USER9> The answer is in the deck.

[https://docs.google.com/a/steveklabnik.com/presentation/d/1e...](https://docs.google.com/a/steveklabnik.com/presentation/d/1e0z1pT9JuEh8G5DOtib6XFDHK0GUFtrZrU3IfxJynaA/preview#slide=id.g177e4bd2b_0192)

<comment><USER10> it is also on slide 53

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I hate that Google Docs modifies your history when you go to the next slide. This presentation clocks in at 57 slides and Firefox history defaults to truncating after 50 entries, meaning I can only go back to slide 7 and not back to HN.

Is it really better that I can use my browser forward and back buttons to navigate slides? Especially when there are forward/back buttons on the presentation anyway?

<comment><USER9> I personally enjoy this aspect, as I think it fits the philosophy of the web better. Each slide has an address, because they're separate things. You can also trivially link to a particular slide this way.

I open articles in new tabs, so the going back to HN part hasn't ever affected me.

<comment><USER12> Each slide should have an address yes but I don't think everything should push do your history stack.

That Git cheat sheet page the was on HN a few days ago. Every time you changed the command it pushed onto your history. I want to click back to HN not back and forth between 2 commands I switched across 6 times.

I was going to comment then but I don't think the site was using push state it is actually browser behaviour.

<comment><USER13> I just open all articles (and all HN comment threads) in new tabs. Sometimes I don't even get to them after scanning the front-page for awhile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I _really_ liked this. Although I prefer to work with Ember.js, Emblem and EmberScript (as the latter addresses some of Ember's syntactical faults), Angular seems very interesting when you view it as more of a toolset for building your own framework than a "complete" framework in and of itself.

When you bring the _entire_ Ember toolchain into the mix, outside of the already-complete framework, it begins to smooth Ember's rough edges in development. It's just the same with Rails, I'm a Ruby developer and we're used to dealing with dependencies already, so it's not really a huge leap outside the box for us to be using tools that will compile down to HTML/CSS/JavaScript to build the frontend to a Rails backend API application.

I still understand Angular as a toolchain/framework/whatever for people who do not understand JS to the point where they want to begin extending it. Angular is a "safe zone", something that frankly JavaScript as a language (without Ember's additions to the object model and such) needs right now. When you write apps in Ember, I feel like a deeper understanding of how JS is working is necessary before you begin to abstract that portion away. Is this still a correct assumption to have? I'm not trying to insult anyone, frankly JS is a pretty screwed up language so I feel like it's a natural tendency to want to just get what you need out of it quickly and safely and then move on to more fun projects. In my opinion, it's simply a different way of doing things, not better and not worse.

</comment><comment><USER15> One thing that I like about Knockout is that you can easily drop it into a legacy site, allowing you to have some pages that use it and others that don't. Forgive my naivete, but is this something that is easy to do with Ember or Angular as well?

<comment><USER16> Angular yes, Ember perhaps not. I this wrote briefly on the subject recently: [http://adambard.com/blog/angular-in-the- small/](http://adambard.com/blog/angular-in-the-small/)

<comment><USER17> Angular definitely not.

<comment><USER18> I've been working on porting mission critical parts of a 10-year-old+ app over to Angular; some of the syntax is clunky but it's definitely doable

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Kudos to the author - I am impressed how well Alex Matchneer understands Angular.

Few thoughts of my own: \- Ember is a long term relationship with one particular way of doing web FE, a way invented by someone else for you. Ember philosophy is "one size fits all". \- On directives and transclusion - it's like Lisp's dotted pair. these new concepts may be hard to understand, but experiments like that often fascinate programmers, and for a good reason - <USER2> day those experiments will revolutionize the way we build software.

The debate of a small set of flexible tools vs one tightly integrated system is not new. We had Linux vs Windows, Django vs Flask, etc. It's funny to see it pop up in yet another area.

Thank you for this great write up and raising a bar of this long going discusiion on Ember vs Angular.

</comment><comment><USER20> I've been working with Ember for a while now, and I love it. Convention over configuration is a big deal, and the Ember team has done it right. I think if you like Rails then you'll like Ember.

</comment><comment><USER21> I use angular a ton, and just learned more about Ember from this. thanks. I'll have to check it out someday. Ember looks like it has good testing now too :-)

</comment><comment><USER22> People really like googling angular

That could also be because angular has horrible documentation!

</comment><comment><USER23> That was a really informative comparison, kudos to the Ember author for injecting minimal bias.

I've been on the fence about switching from jQuery + Coffeescript to Angular/Ember/etc.

Still am, bit of a server-side luddite here, AJAX, client-side form validation, some jQuery effects for dropdown menus, show/hide layers, etc. is as far as I go.

</comment><comment><USER24> Do we really need either Angular's or htmlbars' (see slide 37) way of "decorating DOM elements with behavior" when it is so trivial with just ES5 and HTML? See this jsfiddle: [http://jsfiddle.net/dexygen/nU8VK/](http://jsfiddle.net/dexygen/nU8VK/) Give me a couple/three strong JS devs and I guarantee you I could take these simple building blocks (as well as spans with data- attributes, and innerHTML, instead of templates), and I could build out a framework way faster than either Angular or Ember.js and would validate as HTML5 to boot. Doubt me? I pretty much did the same thing for PHP; see [http://dexygen.com/ria/#!/docs/jackrabbitmvc](http://dexygen.com/ria/#!/docs/jackrabbitmvc)

</comment><comment><USER25> So technically what the presentation is trying to say is that you should use Angular to build Ember like framework. hahah

I personally like Angular, the Google support and the community are strong points to it. The documentation used to be hard to find, but now, specially with StackOverflow, finding what you need is easy.

<comment><USER17> I don't think relying on Stack Overflow is a good solution for lack of good library documentation.

<comment><USER26> Why not? It _is_ a good solution for lacking good library documentation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This format sucks, I can't click on jsfiddle links or even copy them.

<comment><USER7> I just linkified everything, should be good now

<comment><USER27> Great job, thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I enjoyed reading this, as a heavy Angular user & someone interested in trying out Ember sometime. Thanks!</comment>


Ask HN: What is a good license for university based open-source software? - <AUTHOR>

To make a long story short:
After reading an ever growing number of articles about "research should be open source" I finally decided to become active and try to convince my boss to publish some of the software framework I am developing during my PhD. It's nothing fancy but I like the idea of sharing knowledge and it might help other PhD student.
The only problem I have to solve is: My boss wants to have some form or license which states: "If you use this software to produce publications, then you must cite our paper describing this software".
I tried to find something like this but did not come up with anything useful. Has anybody here been in a similar situation? Can I add such an addition to a BSD style license? Or is it enough when I add it to the README? <comment><USER2> There is a bit of a problem using a "must cite our paper" clause. It's very similar to the "obnoxious" advertising clause of the original BSD license, described at <http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html> .

In short, it would mean that people who incorporate your software into their work must also include that citation requirement. Put enough of those together and you might end up with a dozen or more required citations - even if the only thing I copied from your code was a routine for, say, doing matrix multiplies!

Also, what constitutes a "publication"? Is it in a peer-reviewed journal only, or do non-peer reviewed publications also count? Conference papers? Blog posts? If someone does not cite the paper then is the license withdrawn for that person? For how long? Do they restore the license by downloading a new copy of the code?

I'll use the Biopython practice as an example of how another project does things. The README says "If you use Biopython in work contributing to a scientific publication, we ask that you cite our application note (below) or one of the module specific publications (listed on our website): ..."

</comment><comment><USER3> In similar situations I've either used a "BSD with attribution" style license (i.e. <http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing/BSD_with_Attribution>) or simply included a "How To Cite" section in the README. For example, ImageJ is popular in research and the docs include a citation recommendation:

        Abramoff, M.D., Magalhaes, P.J., Ram, S.J. "Image Processing with ImageJ".
        Biophotonics International, volume 11, issue 7, pp. 36-42, 2004.

Another license I've seen used in academia is Matt Might's CRAPL (<http://matt.might.net/articles/crapl/>), which is in some ways very well- suited to the academic publishing world but is pretty tongue-in-cheek.

In my experience (in physics and materials science) most academics _want_ to cite your software if it was useful. Make it clear and obvious, and you'll probably get citations.

</comment><comment><USER4> Just make it easy to cite - often the most difficult part is finding the appropriate citation. For example, how would you cite bash?

And consider the University of Illinois/NCSA license <http://otm.illinois.edu/uiuc_openSource> \- according to gnu.org, it is a simple, permissive non-copyleft free software license, compatible with the GNU GPL.

</comment><comment><USER5> FWIW, I've avoided licensing "must cite" resources several times because the terms were worded problematicaly (e.g. they encoded invalid assumptions, etc.). But I've never had a problem with "how to cite" - in fact, it makes integrating the resource that much easier.

</comment><comment><USER6> Use the BSD or MIT license, and just add the line your boss wants to that.

<comment><USER7> Do such modified licenses still qualify as FOSS (for those who care about such formal qualification)?

<comment><USER2> It's conceptually similar to the advertising clause of the original BSD license, so I believe the FSF viewpoint is that it's free but "obnoxious" and not GPL compatible.</comment></comment></comment>


"The easier college gets, the dumber you look for not having a degree". - <AUTHOR> http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2729#comic

<comment><USER2> I really fucking hate this attitude. It's so completely wrong. At college I Had tutorials with academics that we're all world leaders in their fields. My peers were all top performers and motivated me to push myself as hard as I could. Socially I mixed with great people from all around the world with different perspectives. I mixed with a guy from rural Peru on a scholarship and Jordanian royalty, people from the US, a guy from North Korea. Its a mind opening experience. I met my wife. The may ball at Cambridge is one of the top balls in the world. I was immersed in an intellectual environment like nowhere else, but also had the time of my life playing sport, acting in plays, writing comedy, all with a close community of people living, dining and working together.

And those people studying the soft liberal arts you so despise, two friends in my corridor did classics and English lit. Ones in finance the other is at a security consultancy and they both make twice what I do at Google.</comment>