I won't go that far, but it's a distraction from larger problems, and it makes housing more expensive. These are the same cities charging $0.10 for paper bags at grocery stores because marginal environmental benefit?

> The ones hit hardest are usually younger generations

Reminds me of prop 13. If you challenge grandma having a $3M house paying peanuts for property taxes you are a monster.

If you defend young people that are ready to start a family, "they can kick rocks and move to Bumfuck, Middle-Of-Nowhere, no one is entitled to live in the Bay Area".

How exactly is forcing owners to actually improve their house supposed to make the housing problem worse?

You think it’s going to put house outside of the market at their current price? It’s an insignificant dent in the profit margin.

I’m not sure where you live, but in my case, I wasn’t even able to get home insurance without an automatic gas shutoff valve. Our policy also required an automatic shutoff for water. So in that sense, earthquake safety is already being addressed through insurance requirements.

Ultimately, mandates like this just make housing even more expensive. Which, frankly, seems to be the real goal. God forbid home prices actually decline or even stop rising.

"A direct-vent natural gas-fired water heater is probably the simplest, most reliable appliance you could own. It requires no electricity." I won't address the legality issue, but: First, I'm not sure about the no electricity; if the heater has a pilot light, then I suppose no, but otherwise it requires electricity at least for the igniter.

Second, you're missing another reason for getting a heat pump water heater. We just last week replaced our 13 year old (and therefore on its end of life) gas heater with a heat pump water heater. It requires no gas :). One reason for doing that is that using electricity to run a small heat pump is far cheaper where we live than gas. (We have solar panels, which makes it still cheaper--in fact, free.)

The only things remaining in our house that use gas are the stove and a gas log fireplace. We've used the latter twice during the 13 years we've lived in the house. If we replace the stove (which we'll need to do some day, it's almost 25 years old) with an electric one, then I'd be easily persuaded to turn off the gas fireplace, and end the delivery charge on gas.

As an electric appliance owner, I'll take that chance.

There are induction heated woks in more civilized countries. But again, in the US you're fucked with the third-worldian 120Volts.

To be fair in houses it's relatively easy to run a gas cooker on bottles of propane, mains gas isn't necessary for this.

The very big issue in San Francisco is the severe lack of affordable housing. When renovations become significantly more expensive, those costs inevitably get passed on to renters: making the crisis even worse.

If regulations like these are necessary, they should be applied in areas without a housing affordability crisis. But somehow, it’s always the high-cost cities that get hit with even more burdens.

I’m guessing you’ve never been to SF? The quality of housing in SF is really poor, with most affordable homes being decades behind in renovations and upkeep. This requirement adds unnecessary costs in an already overheated market.

The overton window is skewed? Do you think people 20 years ago would be more likely to agree or disagree with this policy, compared to people today? What about 40 years ago? What about 60 years ago? 80 years? If anything, the window has moved so far in the direction of your ideology that this is the first point in history where such a policy would have any chance of being implemented.

Given that (the better) EVs are cheaper to operate, cheaper to maintain, accelerate faster than ICEVs, and don't create as much net pollution, these should be the preferred option rather than using the sky as a sewer. The problem right now is most of America is fixated upon ancient and harmful technologies and isn't do enough to incentivize buying EVs. And it's actually limiting consumer choice by slapping giant tariffs on international EV options that are surpassing the capabilities of domestic ones. EVs should be (re)incentivized such that they are significantly cheaper to buy than ICEVs.

> As I understand it, it gets cool enough in SF to require heating a lot of the time.

Definitely not "a lot of the time". The coldest it gets is maybe 40°F on a particularly chilly winter night - with a well-insulated house you hardly even need central heat.

Heat pumps are very efficient form of heating. The nice part is that you can use them to cool the home too.

While SF has microclimates, the weather goes from barely cold to barely warm. It doesn't really need heating or A/C very much. The thing though is that PG&E's (traditionally) lower costs for natural gas than electricity incentivize(d) the consumption and use of gas water heaters, clothes dryers, and stoves. If the city-county of SF or state wanted to address this as a policy level, they could slap a tax on natural gas. The thing though is they should help people afford the change to electric and on-going higher costs of electricity because people on fixed incomes cannot afford any changes.

FWIW, most high-end restaurants rely on induction these days. (Sometimes, though not always, exclusively.)

What’re you doing to move the pan all the time? If you’re working with a wok and doing a lot of fast paced work you’d find in a restaurant, I’d understand because induction wok surfaces are hard to come by in the US.

But I don’t get it otherwise. I’m rarely moving the pan so much that induction wouldn’t be usable.

Yes, liberal used to be about increasing freedom, now it seems to be more about bans and penalties for non-conformers

And that's why dozens of homes go boom every year. My dumbass aunt nearly blew up her 100+ year old house because of 60+ year old under-maintained gas lines that caused a minor fire.