188. Meritocracy & housing

Problems with meritocracy

Besides the obvious problems (people who don't excel, for instance), another flaw of meritocracy is that, for the big winners, it doesn't stay a meritocracy. Once you're filthy rich it doesn't require that much merit to stay wealthy and to even build on that wealth. Which is not to say that everyone can manage this.

The descendants of the really rich simply become a new class of privilege you are born into -- in the same way that noble families in Europe started out as a kind of meritocracy in a much earlier era. Back when the Roman era was transitioning into the Middle Ages, positions of merit became inherited and a class system came into being. Now it's a system based on wealth (not just land) whereas then it was primarily a land based system. But this could change again.

The never-ending saga

Replacing our bad sump pump should happen next week, on their third visit. Given the difficulty of their getting a truck in here, I would have brought along a replacement pump "just in case." But I don't run the world.

In the end of our alley, there are two gates. One was replaced last year and now the other gate has been patched and repainted. It looks pretty good to me,

On the right.

This is the color of their other fences, so I guess they had some extra paint on hand. I would have painted it to match the rest of this fence, myself.

Profiles in crazy

Earlier today I was sharing a large table at Starbucks. The person on the end to my right was a somewhat disheveled looking older woman (at least as old as me) who sounded normal enough at first, but after an hour or so I became aware that she was probably crazy in a very similar way to someone in my building who imagines herself to be the subject of a huge conspiracy. 

This woman caught my ear as she kept trying to make an appointment for an ophthalmologist. In fact, from what I could hear -- casually eavesdropping while also working on something else -- she may have made several "emergency" appointments for her acute cornea problem. Between making these appointments she was calling regulatory or industry associations to complain about some doctor who had, to simplify, done her wrong. As I said, she sounded perfectly normal most of the time, but got quite emotional while trashing this doctor. 

I really wanted to look to see if she showed any sign of this emergency problem she complained of, but my angle was bad and it would have been too obvious. Insects, and even prey animals, have such an advantage when it comes to nonchalantly eyeing neighbors. No wonder horses don't miss a thing.

The Van Ness corridor

Had a number of things to do along Van Ness today so I got to review the latest crop of new development along Franklin/Van Ness/Polk. There's not one of them that turned out well. The hospital isn't finished on the outside -- and I still have some hope for it -- and there's a smaller building at Clay and Larkin that isn't bad, but the others are so bland that they look like boring commercial buildings even though I'm pretty sure they are all residential. I think they were planned at a time when the need for housing was so intense that the developers thought they would just be wasting money making them look interesting.

In fact, so much new housing has hit the market, or is about to hit the market, that rental rates and condo values are starting to moderate just a bit. Though, to be fair to the developers, this could mean that they are in a better position to drop prices since they haven't invested in features that would appeal to the high end.

Given the fairly desperate housing situation in SF, it's amazing to me how many units are sitting empty. At least one, and possible two of the small buildings on my alley are vacant. Virtually all of the subsidized housing in Chinatown -- and there's a lot -- is being renovated and has been vacant for a year or more. Who thought it was a great idea to do all those projects at the same time? It makes no sense from any perspective except that of the contractors who I imagine are getting a premium for their work.

I'm not saying that there will be a glut of housing on the market in 2018, but I don't see how all this new and renovated housing could fail to alter the market. 

13. Architecture walk + The Sunflower

Previous - 12. Budd Road

Link to Table of Contents

Photos!

I finally went back and got a couple shots of that multi-building project going up where a bus parking lot once was: 

None of these structures have much appeal on their own but I think they are an improvement over a parking lot. Would also be unfair to judge the complex until the landscaping is finished. The buildings on the far left of the bottom image are common to both photos -- just for reference.

[Note to self: You have to select the image in Google Photo then two finger click it to get the correct image address.]

An assortment of new buildings in the SOMA/Mission Bay area of San Francisco. We start with some indifferent urban infill:

And then move into Mission Bay where they started from scratch and decided that people who choose to spend a premium for building space in San Francisco really want buildings and a new neighborhood that could be anywhere:

Yes, these are goats clearing brush on lots that haven't yet been built on.

The view towards downtown.

Back to the pre-existing street grid as we near Pier 70 (the old shipyard) and Dogpatch:

The building below, and in the center above, at least has some visual interest. Why is it feasible to do small projects of interest as infill but not as part of large scale projects? Why is bigger almost always duller?

They are starting to re-develop the old shipyard. I had hoped they would preserve these old cranes as industrial sculpture (think Gas Works Park on Lake Union in Seattle), but apparently that isn't going to happen.

More infill, the second image below shows a project that incorporates older, masonry buildings (the two structures on the left) along with the new.

The building below with the interesting facade is an older structure converted for use as an event venue.

This sculpture of the SF Bay is in the lobby.

A new take on the traditional SF bay window.

The images below show the interesting podium that supports a very dull residential building that tries everything it can think of to be not quite so dull.

Loved this detail of the electrical hookups.

The north facing wall of the building -- above the podium -- reads as flat and blank even a few blocks away.

My life...

...seems to be getting back to normal. I'm currently reading The Sunflower by Simon Wiesenthal while very slowly re-reading Martha Grimes' Belle Ruin. An odd sort of normal, I'll admit. 

Belle Ruin is dreamy and full of good food and innocent childhood. The Sunflower is the "problem of evil" coupled with an ethical dilemma. 

I've only started the latter today, but I'm plowing through rather quickly. The question presented is, "Can a Jew in the midst of the Holocaust forgive a repentant member of the SS? And if he can, should he?" 

As for the first question, I'm tempted to say that we are all just doing the best we can, so we have to be willing to give others a break. We can't know how we would have behaved in their place so we are really in no position to judge them. 

But the second question is harder. I can say the above in part because I've lived a very easy and fortunate life. In Wiesenthal's place I could only say, "I wish I could forgive you but you're asking the wrong person. I sympathize but I can't be the one to forgive."

I couldn't help noticing that the SS guy in this story had a background similar to Mussolini's -- a socialist father and a religious, Catholic mother. I tend to think that people adopt the prejudices of their families, but here he rejected his family's values and embraced the values of his peers and society, in this instance the Hitler Youth. In some ways this is even more depressing than people raised to be hateful. (We really don't know that much about the values of the parents except that they were not National Socialists. So I may be reading too much into this little biography.)

Next - 14. Turnbuckles

3. Photos

Previous - 2. Change

Ocean Ave, 2

After forty years in the City I still forget how foggy it is on the west side of town in the summer. Downtown it was sunny and a bit warm (for here.) In the Ingleside it was cold and the fog was at street level in places.  

Above and below are shots of the complex that has replaced the auto parts store. (That's an outbound K streetcar above.)

Above and below are shots of the building where the streetcar turnaround and parking lot were.

Above are the two building across the street from Whole Food. The one with scaffolding up is the older, already in need of maintenance. 

A too quick shot of Beep's Burgers -- a long time, local hangout that still exists under new management.

Here's the new bus terminus and turnaround.

Since I was there I decided I should grab my own shot of City College up on the hill, but the fog had other ideas,

It would be up behind the pole in the center of the shot if you could see it.

And here's a bonus, the recently closed, last gun store in San Francisco (in the Mission district and more or less on my way home if I take the bus so I can stop at my favorite taqueria,)

 

Postscript

You are supposed to be able to edit in Photobucket, and I can -- the edits just don't stick. If I can figure out what's going wrong I will crop most of these photos much tighter.

Update

A day later my edits are all there, but now we have the problem that what Photobucket saves is not what you see in the editor. I'm going to try to make these as presentable as possible but I'm also going to switch to Google Photo. I use so much Google software pretty soon I'm going to have to make Google the beneficiary of my estate.

EDIT: Now lets see what Google Photo can do. Here's that neighborhood building I mentioned that has a modern take on bay windows,

Now let's try some shots that have been edited:

Lesson above, don't save low-res if you're going to crop.

This is a closeup of the overhead wires in the photo above.

One of SF's old ballrooms.

So it works. I just need to keep an eye on the image quality.

Next - 4. tl: dr

2. Change

Previous - In which we begin

Ocean Ave

Forty years ago this stretch of Ocean Ave. near City College was dead and decrepit. Besides City College itself, up on the hill, 

Two things worth noting in this image: The Benny Bufano St. Francis statue in the foreground and the legend carved above the entrance, which I've always thought was a little too close to "Arbeit Macht Frei." 

...the most fun thing out here was the street car turnaround by the fire station. When the K-Ocean street car completed it's outbound run, the car would loop around behind the fire station, through a passage between the fire station and the college bookstore, and then the driver would take his break at this old, covered facility built between sets of tracks (or tracks and a bus lane -- I can't quite recall and I can't find a photo.) Just to the north was a sloping mound of dirt that was one edge of an old reservoir in the years before it occurred to people that a massive volume (and weight) of water contained by dirt mounds, with thousands of people living below, probably wasn't a good idea. This is only a few miles from the epicenter of the 1906 earthquake. (OK, more than just a few miles but still pretty close.)

First the K-Ocean line was extended across the freeway to the BART station so you could connect between train and what was now termed "light-rail." (If you could discover where the light-rail stopped, as the signage was possibly the worst I've seen anywhere.)

More recently, the auto-parts store -- and its large parking lot -- were replaced by a generic apartment complex with retail below. I'm sitting in the cafe of the Whole Food market where the parking lot used to be. To me that's progress. 

The streetcar turn-around was finally removed and reconfigured for several bus lines, making space for yet another apartment building. And there are now a couple more new buildings added across Ocean. Meanwhile, the old reservoir evolved from college parking lot to an extension of the City College campus. 

The street and sidewalks were tarted up over a decade ago now -- though they are still making local improvements -- and the commercial strip west of the reservoir in now looking more prosperous, though one wouldn't call it upscale by any means. A small Target store opened there just recently (I guess you could call it a "small box" store) and more buildings are going up increasing, one supposes, the foot traffic on Ocean. There's even a new branch library. 

A friend of mine bought a house a block off Ocean twenty some-odd years ago because it was the only place they could afford in the City. I just checked Zillow and they now value that property at just under a million dollars. (Zillow is not always accurate, it's way off with my condo, but I don't think this is too far off.)

Progress or just change?

I can't really say anything in favor of these new buildings besides that they house hundreds of people -- and a few businesses -- in structures that meet current seismic standards. I've seen worse, but I couldn't pick these structures out of an architectural lineup. 

It is hard to design buildings that look like "San Francisco" architecture without simply mimicking the familiar bay windows. One local architect has tried to invent new versions of the bay window but, while one is in my neighborhood and I think it's an interesting looking structure, I had to be informed that that's what they were up to. Borrowing space, and light, and views, from the street is something that should appeal to even today's developers, but few of the new buildings attempt it. 

One of the first post WW2 skyscrapers here, what was then the Bank of America headquarters, did perhaps the best job of incorporating this feature in a modern building -- though it is surrounded by a stupid plaza so is more form than function.

To be fair, my favorite buildings downtown, mostly built after 1906 and before 1950, do not have a distinctly San Francisco character either. Their appearance was shaped by the École des Beaux-Arts -- rather than the more recent structures that are shaped by the Bauhaus -- and could probably have been built in any American city of the day. 

Here's a perfect way to wrap up this post: A Muni driver just came into the cafe to buy some refreshments before his next run. He at least has many more options than he would have had even 10 years ago.

Postscript

As I was boarding the streetcar to go home after writing the above, it suddenly occurred to me that I could take photos of what I was talking about. Genius! I'm going to publish this now just to keep my momentum from falling victim to the entropy of not-planning-what-your-doing, but I now think I see one way this blog will be different than the ones before. I will be doing more "showing" along with all the "telling."

Next - 3. Photos