I hate the moral outrage against gentrification. It's natural to desire something that good but, somehow immoral to express that desire.
Venice and the south side of Santa Monica used to be kinda a sketchy place to live and had alot of crime though, it was on the beach.
Crime went down (as it did all over LA) and went from an undesirable place to live to a desirable one. When people express that desire by actually moving themselves and their businesses there, the people that were previously there are outraged.
I get being mad at market rates going up in your neighbourhood; it's basically a selfish desire to keep things as they were for yourself. Especially if it goes so far as to move you out of your neighbourhood but, to make it moral as if these people who naturally moving to the best place they can find for a price they can pay are somehow trying to personally inflict evil on the people that already live there is silly.
One might as well try to stop the tide from rising. We live in a capitalist society. Real estate is one of the largest markets there is, literally trillions of dollars in value. Even small changes in value can have huge effects.
There is no simple solution. Even if Snap, Inc. did move to a suburb in the valley somewhere, they would lose a significant, expensive chunk of their workforce. The young, mostly childless employees of Snap, Inc. are exactly the kind of people that love living in Venice. Everyone loves living there, how do I know? The rental prices in Venice are astronomical. People already have sacrificed alot to live there, they aren't going to move to the valley. They are going to keep their friends and their short commutes and move to a company in their neighbourhood.
People were living there and now they can't afford to live there. Why would they be happy about economic forces that do nothing but push them to the margins? It's empathy, not """moral outrage""" which is just a politically correct phrase for "contentious political issues I want to dismiss".
Assuming you're talking about the rising cost of housing, how is that Snap's fault? These people who can't afford to live there -- either they owned their dwelling (in which case they can still afford to live there because nothing's changed) or they rented (in which case the landlord is to blame, because his costs didn't change).
> either they owned their dwelling (in which case they can still afford to live there because nothing's changed)
One nit with this: when the price of your house goes up, local governments have a tendency to reassess it to their benefit and massively increase your property tax bill. So it's possible to own your home outright but still get pushed out of it by your local government's taxation practices.
> in which case the landlord is to blame, because his costs didn't change
1) See above: the landlord's costs potentially do go up significantly.
2) See the frequent advice here recommending against "cost-plus" pricing.
Sibling comment explains why point 1 is not relevant in CA. But:
> 2) See the frequent advice here recommending against "cost-plus" pricing.
This is essentially my point -- it's logically and ethically inconsistent to blame Snap for raising prices AND excuse landlords for adjusting prices to meet demand.
People who criticize gentrification usually don't excuse the landlord. In fact, most community orgs that fight gentrification target their protests against the landlords. In NYC, for example, it's usually targeted at landlords forcing tenants out of rent-controlled units, and developers that replace low or mixed income housing with fully luxury buildings.
> or they rented (in which case the landlord is to blame, because his costs didn't change)
Maybe, given the example of the Bay Area's housing crisis, tech companies should have the moral responsibility in spending part of their lobbying budget to at least try to change local zoning laws. If not for the benefit of the preexisting residents whose lives have been affected by their presence, at least for their own employees who struggle to find affordable housing.
The bitter thing about gentrification is that as the median income of the residents increases, suddenly all the municipal services get much, much better while corporations start dumping money into the neighborhood.
Meanwhile the residents are pushed out to a more marginalized community which in turn will be neglected until it is profitable to invest in it.
Don't forget, too, that these neighborhoods aren't so sketchy because of natural forces. It was policy that created them and immiserated their residents. It's a structural feature.
Snap and its employees need to go somewhere. Someone is going to be displaced by the billions of dollars they generate suddenly being dumped into a local economy. If not Venice, then some other relatively cheap area.
Snapchat is a unique case because they've insisted on shoving their growing workforce into a bunch of small bungalows, retail spaces and storefronts--including Nikki's, a beloved neighborhood bar--scattered throughout Venice. This has had a really outsized and unfortunate effect on the neighborhood that goes well beyond the standard gripes about gentrification and rising rents.
They've taken one of the most walkable, lively communities in LA--where you could just wander around ambling into funky shops, cafes and bars--and turned it into their private, cordoned-off distributed campus.
One of the most vibrant neighborhoods in the city has turned dead and boring. I lived in Venice when I first moved to LA and absolutely adored it, but there's literally nobody left except techies and tourists. If that's the sort of place Snapchat employees want to live then more power to them. Let them stay by the beach as LA's center of gravity continues to shift to DTLA and the eastside.
But even if a retail vacancy appears--it kinda diminishes the quality of a pedestrian-friendly neighborhood for a private corporate office rather than another retail storefront, bar or restaurant to take its place.
I'm a free marketer, blah blah blah, Snapchat is free to set up shop wherever they want within the bounds of the law. My point is to say what they are doing is lame, and they've made Venice lame. And it's uniquely lame compared to cases where tech giants set up shop in a single large commercial building that can accommodate all their employees within a locale.
Why do you think DTLA and eastside are becoming more important? (For tech) It seems the opposite is true, "Silicon Beach" continues to be the center of LA tech and there's no signs of this changing. Especially with the new train, many can work westside and live somewhere near a train station.
When I said "center of gravity" I was referring to culture--art, live music, nightlife and food--not tech, which is certainly centered in Venice and Santa Monica.
DTLA is cheaper for artists especially around the warehouses. Silverlake use to be cheap until it was gentrified. Venice is still pretty crappy. Love it but still crappy. Also a lot of the housing there are old apartments covered by rent control.
> Snapchat is a unique case because they've insisted on shoving their growing workforce into a bunch of small bungalows, retail spaces and storefronts--including Nikki's, a beloved neighborhood bar--scattered throughout Venice
I don't have knowledge of this particular situation, but I get the sneaking suspicion that there are building restrictions that render them unable to pursue the more traditional technique of building large buildings to house their workforce.
Move them off to an industrial park so everyone can complain about traffic and how every lives so far from where they work, instead of having live/work neighborhoods!
You can have live / work communities without shoehorning a $35 billion company and its 2,000 employees into a bunch of retail storefronts originally built as single-family dwellings in the 1920's.
There's plenty of large commercial space nearby in downtown Santa Monica, Culver City and Plays Vista. None of those are the distant industrial parks you allude to. Based on your comment I'm reasonably certain you have zero familiarity with this area.
Do the buildings only have 1 floor? It's not hard to have 2 or 3 stories buildings that doesn't look ugly, then the first floor could be retail/restaurants and the floor above it could be companies like Snap.
Using the first floor for anything non retail/restaurants seems like a waste of space
I was not attempting to speak to the area. I was speaking to the attitude that nobody's ever happy. Good economy? Things are getting too expensive! Labor/goods are cheap? Everyone's pissed they can't find work! Jobs? Traffic! Unemployment? Poverty!
Agree with @danhak, this has less to do with gentrification and more about how they are affecting the community and businesses. Venice boardwalk is a major tourist attraction for the westside. Where snap is located, used to be filled with eateries, bars and other various shops. All the buildings that snapchat are taking have made these areas a ghost town.
They could easily move to Playa Vista literally 10 minutes away, where they are developing a huge business park area and where FB is moving in. I can understand why the residents there are upset.
And the thing frequently in common with California gentrification stories is building restrictions because god forbid the neighborhood look different than it did 40 years ago when a bunch of new people want to move in.
Of course when you limit the supply to 1/10th of what is desired, only the richest people will get it.
There's truth to what you're saying -- neighborhoods change -- but it's a matter of degrees. In Econ 101 it's called a "positive externality", a public good that arises from economic activity but is not accounted for in private transactions. That's what neighborhoods like Venice have going on and it's a function of a lot of activity by artists, small businesses and rather humble folks, who all collectively benefit as a result. It is not being charged for; it relies on voluntary cultural contributions back to the community to sustain it.
A relatively large, well-funded corporation swooping in to soak up those benefits, without really offering in-kind cultural contributions, threatens to destroy that unique positive externality that Venice has.
It's shameful that this comment has been voted so far down so quickly, for what I can only assume are ideological reasons. Are there a lot of Snap employees here, or are HN users insecure about their own contributions to the problem of gentrification?
Amazon in Seattle is the most extreme example of a tech company dominating its hometown that I know of. Block after block of Amazon buildings, right in the heart of the city. I personally think it's alright, but I expect locals that know what got pushed out are less sanguine about it.
Block after block of Amazon buildings, right in the heart of the city. I personally think it's alright, but I expect locals that know what got pushed out are less sanguine about it.
When I was growing up, downtown Seattle was a wasteland at night and South Lake Union worse. Amazon has a large but consolidated presence in places that at one point contained almost no housing.
Agreed. Reading this story, Snap struck me as the anti-Amazon. Whereas Snap moved into an established neighborhood and took over, Amazon focused development on a neighborhood that was derelict and turned it into a ripe area for other developers (e.g., Paul Allen's Vulcan).
> Amazon has a large but consolidated presence in places that at one point contained almost no housing.
Exactly, and SLU now has a lot of new housing, mostly filled with Amazon employees.
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[ 0.28 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadThis makes for delightful places to live and work, but also provides a natural resistance to large unexpected change.
Venice and the south side of Santa Monica used to be kinda a sketchy place to live and had alot of crime though, it was on the beach.
Crime went down (as it did all over LA) and went from an undesirable place to live to a desirable one. When people express that desire by actually moving themselves and their businesses there, the people that were previously there are outraged.
I get being mad at market rates going up in your neighbourhood; it's basically a selfish desire to keep things as they were for yourself. Especially if it goes so far as to move you out of your neighbourhood but, to make it moral as if these people who naturally moving to the best place they can find for a price they can pay are somehow trying to personally inflict evil on the people that already live there is silly.
One might as well try to stop the tide from rising. We live in a capitalist society. Real estate is one of the largest markets there is, literally trillions of dollars in value. Even small changes in value can have huge effects.
There is no simple solution. Even if Snap, Inc. did move to a suburb in the valley somewhere, they would lose a significant, expensive chunk of their workforce. The young, mostly childless employees of Snap, Inc. are exactly the kind of people that love living in Venice. Everyone loves living there, how do I know? The rental prices in Venice are astronomical. People already have sacrificed alot to live there, they aren't going to move to the valley. They are going to keep their friends and their short commutes and move to a company in their neighbourhood.
One nit with this: when the price of your house goes up, local governments have a tendency to reassess it to their benefit and massively increase your property tax bill. So it's possible to own your home outright but still get pushed out of it by your local government's taxation practices.
> in which case the landlord is to blame, because his costs didn't change
1) See above: the landlord's costs potentially do go up significantly.
2) See the frequent advice here recommending against "cost-plus" pricing.
This is not a problem in California: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(197...
> 2) See the frequent advice here recommending against "cost-plus" pricing.
This is essentially my point -- it's logically and ethically inconsistent to blame Snap for raising prices AND excuse landlords for adjusting prices to meet demand.
Maybe, given the example of the Bay Area's housing crisis, tech companies should have the moral responsibility in spending part of their lobbying budget to at least try to change local zoning laws. If not for the benefit of the preexisting residents whose lives have been affected by their presence, at least for their own employees who struggle to find affordable housing.
If there's a place that's cheaper to live because it's sketchy and full of crime, what do you do? Should it stay that way?
Meanwhile the residents are pushed out to a more marginalized community which in turn will be neglected until it is profitable to invest in it.
Don't forget, too, that these neighborhoods aren't so sketchy because of natural forces. It was policy that created them and immiserated their residents. It's a structural feature.
So what policies would you change? What actually is the answer?
They've taken one of the most walkable, lively communities in LA--where you could just wander around ambling into funky shops, cafes and bars--and turned it into their private, cordoned-off distributed campus.
One of the most vibrant neighborhoods in the city has turned dead and boring. I lived in Venice when I first moved to LA and absolutely adored it, but there's literally nobody left except techies and tourists. If that's the sort of place Snapchat employees want to live then more power to them. Let them stay by the beach as LA's center of gravity continues to shift to DTLA and the eastside.
But even if a retail vacancy appears--it kinda diminishes the quality of a pedestrian-friendly neighborhood for a private corporate office rather than another retail storefront, bar or restaurant to take its place.
I'm a free marketer, blah blah blah, Snapchat is free to set up shop wherever they want within the bounds of the law. My point is to say what they are doing is lame, and they've made Venice lame. And it's uniquely lame compared to cases where tech giants set up shop in a single large commercial building that can accommodate all their employees within a locale.
I don't have knowledge of this particular situation, but I get the sneaking suspicion that there are building restrictions that render them unable to pursue the more traditional technique of building large buildings to house their workforce.
There's plenty of large commercial space nearby in downtown Santa Monica, Culver City and Plays Vista. None of those are the distant industrial parks you allude to. Based on your comment I'm reasonably certain you have zero familiarity with this area.
Do the buildings only have 1 floor? It's not hard to have 2 or 3 stories buildings that doesn't look ugly, then the first floor could be retail/restaurants and the floor above it could be companies like Snap.
Using the first floor for anything non retail/restaurants seems like a waste of space
They could easily move to Playa Vista literally 10 minutes away, where they are developing a huge business park area and where FB is moving in. I can understand why the residents there are upset.
They've wedged themselves deeper into your mind than you even know (referring to their logo.)
sure, keep kicking them from locale to locale. doesn't solve much and systemic abuse doesn't win many points.
Of course when you limit the supply to 1/10th of what is desired, only the richest people will get it.
A relatively large, well-funded corporation swooping in to soak up those benefits, without really offering in-kind cultural contributions, threatens to destroy that unique positive externality that Venice has.
https://soundcloud.com/daily-intelligencer/spike-lee-on-gent...
When I was growing up, downtown Seattle was a wasteland at night and South Lake Union worse. Amazon has a large but consolidated presence in places that at one point contained almost no housing.
It wouldn't be hard to make Seattle's overall housing situation a LOT more affordable: http://crosscut.com/2015/09/the-burden-of-building-low-incom..., but most wealthy existing owners don't want that to happen. Hell, even legalizing three-story townhouses: http://crosscut.com/2015/04/bring-back-the-townhouse-can-mil... would do a lot.
> Amazon has a large but consolidated presence in places that at one point contained almost no housing.
Exactly, and SLU now has a lot of new housing, mostly filled with Amazon employees.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4973548/