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Startup CEO Dudebro Wishes 'Degenerates' Would Stop Ruining 'The Civilized Part' of San Francisco

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A hollow voice says: Abort SCOTUS12/11/2013 3:16:25 pm PST

re: #8 aagcobb

The problem is zoning. Zoning prevents increased density in high income areas, so to provide more lucrative high income housing they have to remove lower income housing. More rich people wanting to move to S.F. ought to be a boon for everyone, creating more construction jobs and more service jobs. Zoning also eliminated long ago the type of places we use to call “flop houses” which could provide shelter for the poor.

It’s much more complicated than that. The reason there’s no high density housing is that any time you want to obstruct a view in San Francisco (which anything over about three stories will do) the neighbors rise up in fury and prevent it from happening. Plus the fact that SF is a peninsula, and there’s no place to expand to. (The area he’s talking about is the flophouse area, and the housing there is comparatively cheap still, though perhaps not after this.) There was something like a balance before the influx of techies, now the people who would “support” the added population and hold the lower-level jobs in the tech industry can’t find housing, and the same level people already living there are being driven out by the influx of the well-heeled.