alt Hacker NewsIt's kind of insane that you look at a city like San Francisco that's on a tiny bit of land in a desirable location and they absolutely refuse to build up.
I get that their Victorian houses are pretty, but they're only about a 100 years old and they are now crammed full of people and cars. It's too young of a city to be sycophantically in love with its past self.
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> 100 years old
It’s 2026, they’re more like 140 year old by now :)
> now crammed full of people and cars
Funnily enough, if you look at the 1950 census, in every single building I have lived in in San Francisco, there were more people than there are now :).
The city has so much underdeveloped land (come on, 2% of of the surface of of the second densest city in the US spent on the lowest density sport ever, golf???), tearing down our heritage does not make sense when we have so much usable space.
Where do you draw a line? 100 years? 200? 500? Especially if buildings age nicely and they’re still considered good-looking.
I’m in Europe and here if people suggested to tear down some art noveau buildings because they’re just 100-150 years old… I’d be absolutely furious. Don’t get me started on buildings from 200 or 300 years ago.
With US having much less old buildings, I totally get why people want to preserve such buildings.
That's partly the effect of prop 13. When land (or its proxy, property) is detaxed then property becomes a valuable commodity to hoard and guard the value of jealously.
So, it attracts the foreign investors looking for stores of value and encourages NIMBYism.
If the tax bill of properties in high value locations went up with land value then it would encourage people to stop hoarding and to sell up and have their properties redeveloped.
So, blame Howard Jarvis and his taxpayer's foundation.