For those who are wondering, given the publisher, no, the essay is not simply a rant against rent-control:
> True revolution would involve curbing the authority of the San Francisco Planning Commission. If Democrats in the city or in Sacramento actually cared about the poor or the environment (density is green), they would enact a land-value tax and establish a redistributive policy to align the interests of the city, current residents, and future citizens. Strong government housing policy could spur growth and redistribute the city’s wealth fairly. But most of all, the freedom to build and experiment is the engine of Silicon Valley dynamism. Allow the experiments of the few to become the prosperity and fulfillment of the many, and the city could thrive once again.
They've made millions from the appreciation of their houses, but they are still active in preventing new housing to try to juice their returns even more. It's a problem of how many Americans see their house as their biggest investment (and if you were a granny who bought in California 50 years ago it likely is). So naturally these wealthy landowners who bought property decades ago are going to fight to preserve their investment, but like the article points out, they're actually slowly killing their investment.
Repeal of Prop 13 would be implicit in any land value tax, so not mentioning it is a severe deficiency of understanding the power of San Francisco to properly govern itself.
Prop 13, despite benefitting landlords and commercial property owners more than homeowners, has an unfair reputation of keeping "grannies" in their homes in face of unfair taxation. Mention repeal of Prop 13 for commercial property, and even otherwise sensible people will start saying how heartless it is to ignore the plight of grannies, since this inappropriate connection is so strong in the collective psyche.
Sorry, not familiar with CA politics ... is the subtext here that a land-value tax would be impossible without a constitutional amendment? Or that California already enacted a 1% ad valorem tax in the 70s?
From what I can tell, Prop 13 seems generally popular[0], but could see an argument that it exacerbates the housing shortage in the Bay Area, so not sure which way you're pointing.
That is my point, yes. And doing so is essentially impossible. It is popular among property owners, who have a huge interest in defeating any attack on it. (It was also slightly amusing to see a history-free call for more taxation in that particular rag, given tribal affiliations.)
It does drive up housing costs. It also distorts commercial transactions weakens, local control, and generally casts a large shadow over, well, any conversation about taxation and anything taxation touches (like real estate) in California.
Yeah, it's an unfair criticism to ask them why they aren't levying a tax they're constitutionally prohibited from.
With that said, it's reasonable to expect them to propose reforms to prop 13 that preserve its core intent but cut back on the death spiral it encourages.
I'm sure that matters to you, but I was talking about the form of the argument. It'd be equally stupid if it were something starting with If Republicans cared about free markets or low taxes...
It's a completely useless way to preface any statement, signalling useless text to follow.
Yes, but no. "X is not acting in accordance with X's stated values" is a perfectly valid statement, for all values of X. "It would help problem Y if X did act in accordance with their stated values" is also a valid statement. What's not valid is to act all surprised that X does not in fact act in accordance with their stated values - especially where politics is involved. (It's still valid to point out that it's happening.)
Politicians dissemble, lie, act hypocritically, mislead voters, and... did I leave anything out? If you want to change their actual behavior, you have to change their incentives. One way to do that is to get the voters to hold their feet to the fire, to get them to act consistently with the values that the voters elected them to embody. (Which gets us back to "X is acting inconsistently..." being a perfectly valid thing to say.)
But the problem can run deeper than that. The voters themselves may mouth certain values, but actually desire things inconsistent with those values. At that point, the politicians are embodying the desires of the voters; the problem is the voters' hypocrisy. Once again, though, pointing out the hypocrisy is about the only way to try to attack the problem. (Changing the voters' incentives would almost always require the voters' acquiescence...)
Yes, it's generally bad form. But the important context here is that Democrats have a mega-majority in the state legislature (up from being a normal super-majority) [0], plus the governor's mansion, likely much of the judicial bench, and much of the electorate (who can weigh-in directly via ballot propositions). If something is or isn't being done in terms of statewide policy and regulations, the buck stops with the Democratic Party more than it would in almost every other jurisdiction.
yeah this was odd, it goes into a typical "meh DEMOCRATS ruin everything" but then he calls for new taxes, a redistributive policy and however vague "strong government housing policy". Doesn't sound very free markety ?
Most of the article was simply stating the obvious about SF, but the end was very weird. When the National Review starts calling for a land-value tax and a “redistributive policy”, I’m sorry, but I’m going to call this disingenuous trolling by the author, because these are not policies the National Review honestly advocates for.
"There's a sense in which all taxes are antagonistic to free enterprise – and yet we need taxes. ...So the question is, which are the least bad taxes? In my opinion the least bad tax is the property tax on the unimproved value of land, the Henry George argument of many, many years ago." —Milton Friedman
I don’t even want to visit San Francisco anymore. Why would the writers want to? I’m making a point about how bad it’s become in San Francisco relative to the rest of the US
My partner and I visited SF last summer and were fairly shocked with all the homelessness, drug use on the streets and human feces scattered about. We won’t be back.
My wife and I had the same experience. As an east coast programmer, I was curious about what it would be like in SF and arrange a vacation to see it for myself. We spent a week there, and both decided that we never ever wanted to move to a place like that. Nothing looked clean (certainly nowhere smelled clean) nor inviting. It would've been a considerable decline in our quality of living to move there.
I'd just like to say, as somebody who used to live in SF, I feel sorry for tourists. What the city is permitting is unthinkable, but up to about a year ago, even saying that it wasn't acceptable was social suicide. Now it's changed a bunch- people are much more clearly stating that allowing people to put up tents and litter the sstreets with poop and needles isn't OK. However, the city really can't do anything about it because it's tolerated this for so long and anything they did would be massively controversial.
Just as a counterpoint to most of the comments here, I find San Francisco to be unique, charming, and beautiful. I have been there ~4 times in the past year and have had a great time every time.
Posts and comments in threads like these cause me to not want to participate on internet communities as my experience in reality seems to not match up with the cavernous anxiety taking place online.
According to the latest SF homeless census[1], nearly 50% of SF's homeless population are in District 6 -- Tenderloin, Civic Center, and SOMA. These are also areas where there are high concentrations of tourists and visitors. Someone just visiting San Francisco vs actually living here is likely to come away with a grim impression.
I lived in SF for several years. The decline described was already a thing in 2005, and has been steadily worsening since. The flats are where businesses are, so doing business in the city means facing the despair of its homeless precisely as described. To quote the article about Florida and ocean level rise, it doesn’t matter how high you lift your house up above the water line if there’s nowhere left for you to go when you leave it.
Infinite growth is the goal of literal cancer. Add in heirarchal systems and the lowest class mobility in first world nations, raising the cost of everything while stagnating wages while the rich shareholders simultaneously take even more wealth (how many yachts do you really need?), and you're just left with shitholes of clearly failed or failing Capitalism like SF and now Seattle where society can't take care of its most vulnerable or solve literally any issues that can't be commodified and sold as a "tech" product.
Society needs a change. The lower classes need a raise.
>Society needs a change. The lower classes need a raise.
The lower classes may get a raise but so will the ones above them to compensate and eventually cost of living just goes up to match the previous status quo.
Having lived in SF for a number of years now, I 100% agree that SF is just dystopian as hell.
Trash everywhere downtown, human feces/needles/smell of urine all over downtown & SOMA, depressing mix of aggressive and zombie-like homeless, very few kids/families, very few minorities (especially African-Americans), barely functioning public transportation system, high rents forcing six-figure earners to live with 2 roommates and still pay $2500/month, 400 sq ft studios going for $700k, every other non-tech worker is an Uber driver/Instacart Shopper/DoorDash delivery person
How is it that so much aggressive political rhetoric related to race and the tech industry is coming from this area if there are very few African Americans there in the first place?
I live in Atlanta where the minority population is much higher all around and I don't get the sense at all that there's rampant racism or discrimination.
Is this problem unique to the Bay Area or is this largely white guilt?
SF used to having a thriving black population. It has declined for decades due to exclusionary housing policies that have forced low/middle income earners out of the city, which disproportionately affects minorities.
But to you question, diversity in tech has little to do with the ethnic makeup of the Bay Area. This is a transient town...people come here to work from all over and it's a completely separate issue.
Back in the mid-20th century, the Fillmore was a thriving black community, with around 50k black residents in a relatively central part of the city.
The city, however, considered it "blighted." Too many homeless people, too much drug use, too much property and violent crime.
And so the SF Redevelopment Agency decided to knock down a bunch of blighted Victorians, relocate the black population, and replace the Victorians with modern apartment buildings.
That was the beginning of the end of African American SF. Obviously some relocated to other areas of the city, but just as many left for other pastures.
Housing policies since then have hardly helped the situation, but YIMBY types need to understand the history of redevelopment both so they don't make the same mistakes and so they have empathy for when poor folks in a community are skeptical of their promised land.
"This is a transient town...people come here to work from all over and it's a completely separate issue"
While true, this elides over a pretty large issue with minorities in tech. In general, the "transient after college" phase, where high potential students move to high potential areas is a privileged position that most people aren't able to participate in for many reasons. Maybe its because your parents (or brothers/sisters/nieces/nephews etc) are struggling and you need to take care of them day today, maybe its because you already have student loans up to the hilt and feel that living at home is a less risky proposition than moving across the country to a place where rent is going to be 2x the size of any paycheck you've ever received, maybe its because you feel the community you come from needs you more than you need a tesla. In general, the types of people who have these types of issues that drive them not to migrate are going to be high performing, but lower wealth, and thus on balance more likely to be non-white all else being equal. IMO, a great way to help make "tech" a more diverse industry would be to open offices in Atlanta, a city with a large black population, and a very good university.
I think what you're seeing is intellectualized social liberalism and what many call "virtue signaling." Many of the residents of SF harbor intellectual views that are very liberal but are not willing to support policies that actually help the poor or disadvantaged minorities if those policies conflict with any other priority they might have (like protecting the valuation of overpriced real estate).
BTW the left has no monopoly on this kind of hypocrisy. Driving through an ultra-conservative region of West Virginia a while back I saw two billboards on opposite sides of the road. One said "Lust: a path straight to hell!" and had a Bible reference. The other advertised a combination strip club and adult bookstore. The region has massively high rates of alcoholism, drug abuse, teen pregnancy, domestic violence, and many other vices, but many of the residents of such regions are pretty self-righteous about how much more Godly they are than the heathens in places like California and New York.
I have found that self-righteousness tends to coincide with hypocrisy.
I'm guessing the lust billboard guy made their sign as a response to the adult entertainment billboard guy, and the two don't share that much in common.
I'm not sure how it's not similar. San Francisco is an area where you have the wealthy NIMBYs and the younger more liberal generation creating policy friction. The older generations tend to be guaranteed votes and will show up to influence policy.
Also, people need to stop accusing others of virtue signalling, because they're just virtue signalling about being above virtue signalling.
A black friend of mine lived in Savanah, ATL, NYC and in the Midwest.
She said that you find just as many racists everywhere, but she “appreciates” the (urban) Southern racists ones more because they don’t try to hide, so she knows where she stands.
I completely agree with her. Some of the worst racism I experienced was passive aggressive type on the west coast. It made me leave my job and move back to the east coast.
Some of the best racism I received was in your face “sand n-word” type — it was easier to digest and joke about after the fact.
I think you're asking the wrong question with the "more" or "less" type thinking.
My own view is that everyone is prejudiced. But people are different. Some are prejudiced and loud mouthed. Some are prejudiced and liars. Some are prejudiced and just quiet. But everyone is prejudiced, so does it matter if one is more loud than the other?
I mean, if you go into a room full of pregnant high school girls, sure, some are loud mouthed. Some are liars. Some are quiet.
Some are "negatively" prejudiced (racists), some are positively prejudiced (~progressives). Very few people in my experience are able to think about this topic in a purely rational and non-emotional manner.
If everyone was racist we'd be living in apartheid.
Frankly, there is no political coalition willing to push apartheid because a plurality of people aren't as racist as some people in this thread seem to think.
What if there was a system that achieved the same effect as apartheid, without requiring an actual apartheid law? Do you think that would be better or worse?
Well that's certainly the intent of some bad policies passed under cover.
But generally speaking if you shine a light to those policies most people will be against them.
I concern myself a lot with these kinds of “shadow caste systems”, so I’m intrigued by your faith that they are universally opposed.
I see a lot of people who sort of cultivate a barrier of ignorance because their bread is buttered by the system. They do their job but, only semi-consciously just won’t peer behind the result of their actions.
So I will meditate a little on your position. Maybe I’ve got the wrong bias here.
The human mind excels at pattern recognition, even when there's no pattern. So I'm not going to try to argue that anyone is un-prejudiced.
The difference is what you do with it. If you treat someone poorly because of your prejudice about their skin color instead of giving them a fair chance, then you're racist.
But I questioned if the feeling that "everywhere is equally racist" is valid, or if the south is actually still more racist, but all the loud racists make it harder to spot the quiet ones, compared to an area that's filled with quiet racists instead.
It doesn't matter if they say the racist thought out loud and then act on it, or they just act on it. Both things are racist. Magicians use misdirection to hide what they're really doing, and I'm suggesting that quiet racists in the south hide their activities by letting the loud racists take all the attention.
That said, I've lived in the south all my life and heard plenty of racism of many different kinds. I lived in Cali for 1.5 yrs and didn't hear much at all, and because I'm white I didn't experience much, either.
The only incident that I recall was being told that I walked through a neighborhood that was very dangerous to white people. I didn't feel threatened, and I don't even think I saw any people there. But I was told later that I should never walk there again, for my own safety. To this day, I don't actually know if that neighborhood really was dangerous to white people, or if the white person I was talking to was just being prejudiced.
However, I did notice that while people talked nicely and smiled, people weren't actually being any friendlier than back where I was raised. They were just hiding things better.
I'm from the south, lived all over in urban and rural areas. Urban areas were the most racist (seemingly out of fear in most instances) by far. It's not overt either; the passive-aggressive stuff is real. Rural area racists seemed to be just uneducated/full of bad info on the most part, but also more vocal. I've also encountered more racists in the northeast than anywhere else (maybe they think I am too because of my accent?; regularly approached to ask about my level of "southern pride")
I will say that the majority of racists I've actually met have been middle- to upper-class. I've always thought this was kinda weird.
I'm not an expert either, just sharing my experiences.
This the most unexceptional, unoriginal wrong talking point that always comes up in these conversations. I've heard it my entire life growing up in the south, and it constantly betrays the OP's actual experiences when dealing with this matter.
It's a southern apology. And a really dumb one at that, fueled by a bitter "us vs. them" mentality ripe everywhere in the south.
There is absolutely no data point supporting this position. Not one. People who live in cities and metro areas are consistently significantly less racist than people who grow up in homogeneous communities, especially compounded if that community is a rural one. What fits both of those criteria? Generally the south.
I'd be hesitant to dismiss this outright. While urban areas don't have as strong a history of explicit racism, a lot of implicit racism takes hold when the percentage of the black population is just too low to encounter blacks in everyday life. You compare "cities and metros" against "homogeneous communities" as though cities and metros are necessarily non-homogeneous. This is not the case. Plenty of cities on the west coast are nearly entirely while. Even moreso if you count white + one other race like Hispanic or Asian. While the latter does offer some kind of non-homogeneity it's still the case that in many cities in liberal states most people go about their working lives without any black coworkers on their team.
> I'm sure there are plenty of racists everywhere, but I do find it hard to believe that there aren't more percentage-wise in the south.
Isn't that statement prejudiced and discriminatory toward people living in the South? You're doing exactly what it is you're accusing and entire geographic region of doing.
Why do you think there are more racists in the South? Why do racists believe what they do? I suspect the answer is the same to both those questions.
It is prejudiced against the South. That's the last acceptable prejudice amongst the "woke," and I say this as a red state SJW. Lots of blue state liberals have no idea that the Southern diaspora code switches with them, often avoids having to talk about where they're from lest it be held against them, that making comments about "escaping the south" isn't cute or funny at all, it's insulting, hurtful, and a microaggression if there ever was one. You can't get ahead if people decide your funny way of talking means you're inherently backwards, ignorant, stupid, and uneducated. For all the crowing and screaming about diversity, where the hell are Appalachian voices in mainstream American discourse? Where are the voices from the rural Mississippi Delta? Places whose culture is unique from the rest of the country but incredibly rich and beautiful and full? Is it because if these places were humanized, maybe the "get what we vote for" narrative used to justify our disenfranchisement and maintain the exploitative power structures that be down here would fall apart?
Mississippi is 40% African American. Of course there are racists down there as there are any where else, but you have any idea how hard it would be to function in Mississippi with that demographic make up if people were half as racist as the South is alleged to be? You'd think they'd be uncovering clandestine mass graves of black people every other week or worse down here s2g. I cannot and will not get over the blackest part of America being labeled "Trump Country" and used as the scapegoat for all of the nation's bigotry. It's fucking lazy victim-blaming. We are the poorest, least educated, and most vulnerable part of the country. Shitty rich people with shitty agendas own our governments, as they have for decades and decades, and the rest of the country sure does get off on telling us our hardships are our own fault.
Indeed, it blows my mind that it's completely acceptable in some company to speak for "the South" as a huge area filled with tens of millions of people think in a homogeneous way. My experience has been that people are no more racist in the south than they are anywhere else. It sure makes it easy to sweep people with slightly different lifestyle under the rug and dehumanize them though.
You and I live in an area that vocally supported the party that said the most racist things and had the most racist votes, and you think we don't have the most racists?
Yes, it sucks that the South is seen as backwards and ignorant. But until we stop electing people who promote racism and prevent social programs that would help people escape poverty, we're going to continue being seen that way.
I'm not saying that racism isn't out of control in the rest of the country. I'm merely saying it's worse in the South still.
> but she “appreciates” the (urban) Southern racists ones more because they don’t try to hide, so she knows where she stands.
I've heard this exact statement in a Dave Chappelle standup bit. I've always taken it to mean that bigots in some areas are simply familiar enough with the area's politics, history and justice system to feel comfortable saying openly bigoted things without fear of repercussion.
>I live in Atlanta where the minority population is much higher all around and I don't get the sense at all that there's rampant racism or discrimination...
???
Uh, you don't notice any racial bickering in Atlanta?
Not saying it's only in Atlanta. It's everywhere, all over the nation really. I'm just wondering where in Atlanta you live that racial bickering is absent in public discourse?
Leaving aside the weird premise of your comment, you're confusing the Bay Area with San Francisco, which are different things. Black communities in the Bay Area are where they are in part because of a very long history of institutional discrimination. Richmond may be the most glaring example—you have a very rich marina district on one side of a freeway, and a very poor one on the other.
Unfortunately I don’t recall which podcast it was, perhaps 99% Invisible, but one had a show on this. One of the things they mentioned was that during WW II now-liberal enclaves like Berkeley told the federal government that they wouldn’t allow housing to be built for black shipbuilders, and similarly Richmond refused but eventually relented on the condition they all be moved out at the conclusion of the war.
There were also redlining practices and things like razing and redeveloping the predominantly black Fillmore making it a neighborhood the previous residents could no longer afford.
Richmond grew during WWII because it was a large ship building yard for the pacific fleet. Lots of white and black people moved to Richmond from the South and East during this time. After the war, the ship building stopped, and the workers needed to get new jobs. There was a large auto plant that opened up in Milpitas (near San Jose), that hired a lot of the workers, both black and white. There were a lot of "whites only" suburbs built near the Milpitas plant and a lot of the white ship workers moved there, bought houses, had short commutes to work, and built wealth through housing appreciation. As white folks left the Richmond community and black folks remained, the lack of political power held by black folks at the time (Jim Crow laws, discrimination, etc) lead to disinvestment in the richmond community (poorer schools, roads didn't get repaired, leading to lower property values etc). The disinvestment and community decline made it more difficult for the black community to move away, because they didn't have any housing wealth compared to neighboring communities (and many communities at the time were "white only"). Additionally, the black workers commuting to Milpitas to work spent 2.5 hrs/day commuting, while the white workers spent like 15 minutes, so thats 2 hours and 15 minutes every day for 25 years that white fathers could spend at home teaching their kids to read/focusing on their education, improving their house, building social connections/capital etc that the black fathers didn't have. That impact on the next generation compounds over time and makes a material impact on the potential of the next generation.
I don't know where this account comes from (none is from that page), but it makes no sense. I grew up there and had friends whose parents and older siblings worked at Ford Milpitas and GM Fremont. UAW members (e.g. those cut from Richmond auto plants) had first dibs; shipyard workers wouldn't have any advantage over others off the street.
"Many communities were white only" is a crock; in fact, Milpitas in the 1970s had higher black propensity than did Fremont to the north or NE San Jose to the south. Both Milpitas and Ayer High schools had more black students than Piedmont Hills to the south. The foothills tended to be pricey and almost exclusively white and Jewish, but that was economic rather than code segregation.
By the 1970s, production at the plant spiraled downward, shifts were cut, abd there were always more workers than hours.
Have you paid attention to the “cityhood” movement in Atlanta, where white people are using their friends in state government to split themselves off from the black neighborhoods in their towns?
I have not and if that's true, that's fucked up and why I'm a libertarian.
In the context of this argument, I think it's worth distinguishing between private and public actions. People have the right to be racist, governments don't.
Wouldn’t the libertarian position be that a group of people looking to secede from a municipality be allowed to do so? Even if they do so in a bloc that includes only wealthy neighborhoods plus lucrative commercial real estate?
> I live in Atlanta where the minority population is much higher all around and I don't get the sense at all that there's rampant racism or discrimination.
When you say "minority population," are you referring to white people or some other minority group in Atlanta, or are you referring to black people, who constitute the majority ethnic group in Atlanta?
1) I don’t know what “aggressive political rhetoric” is, but it comes off as being dismissive of political opinions you disagree with
2) SF the city is a small part of the SF Bay Area. There are lots of black folks living near SF
3) Be very careful making projections about racism from your experience of Atlanta. Atlanta is the catch basin for successful black business for a large fraction of the south. I was born in Atlanta, and was really surprised when people would describe the south as racist, because my experience of race in Atlanta was so positive. But you don’t have to get very far out of the city to experience poorly concealed racism.
1. Large Asian population. The SF companies I've worked at often had 30-45% Asian workforce. In theory this should be a good thing as far as diversity goes (and I have had the privilege of learning from and getting to know people coming from very different societies on a personal level, most of them Asian). But for a variety of reasons I'm not going to dig into, Asians don't count as "diverse" anymore.
2. Overwhelmingly left leaning workforce means that the prevailing liberal attitudes are amplified and go largely unquestioned. This sometimes even manifests itself as the organized exclusion of those that don't harbor the same politics: https://www.fastcompany.com/3067152/lessons-in-techs-past-di...
3. Perhaps as a result of #2, many in the SF Bay area aren't exploring non-discriminatory explanations as to why there are few African Americans in Bay area tech companies. First off, the Black population is not very big in the Bay area. Less than 2% of mountain view's population is black. Overall the Bay area is 6.7% black, about half that of the country as a whole. Couple this with lower rates of educational attainment beyond high school (which is usually necessary for software development roles) and it's not hard to see how a lower black population in Bay area tech roles can happen even absent discrimination in hiring. But saying these things to my coworkers would probably adversely affect my career, so the prevailing narrative of discrimination in hiring is left unchallenged.
This results in some interesting behavior. Tech roles with lower barrier to entry like help desk support are now nearly entirely black, Hispanic, or female. We recently recategorized physical security as a "tech" role (ostensibly because physical security is an important part of infosec) and now easily 70%+ of our physical security staff is black. This has sort of backfired in a sense, the few black developers I know report being consistently mistaken for security or help desk personnel.
> Perhaps as a result of #2, many in the SF Bay area aren't exploring non-discriminatory explanations as to why there are few African Americans in Bay area tech companies. First off, the Black population is not very big in the Bay area. Less than 2% of mountain view's population is black. Overall the Bay area is 6.7% black, about half that of the country as a whole.
What percent of SF Bay area tech workers grew up in the Bay area? If it is not high, it is not clear that the Bay area's general population racial demographics are relevant.
Every action is political and ignoring that reality is how many of these problems are created in the first place. This is why many tech workers "hate politics", they hate having to be responsible for their actions.
Most Americans "hate politics" because they've been socialized to, not because they actually do. "Bureaucracy is bad," is an idea deeply seated in the American psyche.
It's true though, if more of us went to local government sessions, we could probably just utterly dominate the discourse and reject a lot of NIMBYisms outright, and that'd probably result in a lot of political changes.
I myself regret bitterly how much I let my parent's culture influence my opinions on this, and it's only as I get older that I fully appreciate the many toxic and counter-productive ways my fundamental christian socialization has influenced me even as I've struggled to move more left throughout the course of my life.
I have two definitions of politics, to help me think about this. The traditional and perjorative "theater meant to influence a goal" definition, as well as the "earnest, often unconscious, dynamics of a relationship." It is easy to want to avoid the first, but the second is ubiquitous unless you are a self-sufficient hermit.
It's really, REALLY not. I've been here 10 years. I'm post-exit, and I still can't really afford to own a home. I could cash a down payment check, but it'd wipe out most of my savings and the home would be some ancient decrepit thing needing an 8th of its values in repairs. As such, I'm at a disadvantage in exercising political power. I'm constantly forced to move around, limiting the time I have to short stints in any given community.
Most of us actually exert very little influence in local politics, precisely because we're here for the work. I'm in a tiny minority that's decided to "settle down" and not retreat "back home" once I've got a quarter million in investments and another 100k in cash.
And in fact, I think very few of my peers are super into local politics. Even I'm guilty of being somewhat disengaged until recently, and I'm trying to make up for that now in Daly City.
The property owners moving in sync are what dominate a lot of features in this town, and very few "hackers from this site" are actually in that club. Even the rare post-exit folks like me. The truth is that they have a lot more to gain by keeping the status quo than itinerant tech workers have to lose by just leaving rather than dealing with the difficult problem of entrenched NIMBYism.
I'm dealing with that now in my area and it is AGONIZING to sit there listening to some old man or woman go on about how Asians and Brazilians ruining the community and stealing their parking when they're the ones renting out 3 homes in the first place.
I could so see a planet-bound version of the movie Elysium. The elite top 5% live in walled off fortresses, a la Aeon Flux's city, and have everything - while the rest live outside in a daily fight to live against a dystopian environment financially and economically.
I don't think it's inevitable though, so the question is - how do we stop it? We have some of the brighter minds in tech on this forum, what are your thoughts?
I'm not too sanguine about the possibility of either of those things happening in the United States. Public transit has always kind of gone nowhere in this nation outside of the great coastal cities and Chicago. And as for the housing proposal, I can already hear the howls of "SOCIALISM!!!" that will be raised by certain very powerful interests and political parties.
I would be pretty proud of a company that could take people from various backgrounds and education levels, make them productive, and enable them to earn a good living. Same goes for a city.
It's actually funny you said that. After I wrote my earlier comment I was thinking of Frank Loyd Wright's version of the perfect city, Broadacre City. It looks like it might go a ways toward solving some of the modern city problems, if it was viable: https://franklloydwright.org/revisiting-frank-lloyd-wrights-...
>In economics, a commodity is an economic good or service that has full or substantial fungibility: that is, the market treats instances of the good as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them.[1] Most commodities are raw materials, basic resources, agricultural, or mining products, such as iron ore, sugar, or grains like rice and wheat. Commodities can also be mass-produced unspecialized products such as chemicals and computer memory.
>The price of a commodity good is typically determined as a function of its market as a whole: well-established physical commodities have actively traded spot and derivative markets. The wide availability of commodities typically leads to smaller profit margins and diminishes the importance of factors (such as brand name) other than price. [0]
If anything, housing is not enough of a commodity. Each site effectively has a bespoke regulatory framework that has to be discovered as expensively as possible, through a series of planning meetings. Each project requires an extremely high-touch political consensus process. Each building is expected to be unique-but-not-too-unique for its context, of-the-present-moment without altering historical character. As a practical matter, it's really expensive and take a long time and many iterations to arrive at a design that everyone agrees meets those criteria. Watch an SF Planning meeting video sometime. Most of the multifamily projects discussed on any given day are continuations. The curation process yields a great-looking museum, but we pay for the delay and uncertainty it creates in the price of admission.
Houses should be less like houses and more like soybeans: cheap, abundant, with many highly competitive producers and a price that floats just barely above the cost of production. Producers should be responding quickly and effectively to changes in demand, just as in the commodities markets. Commodities are the things we're most likely to have enough of for everyone!
Housing has effectively one producer, the San Francisco planning commission, and if it doesn't feel like meeting demand this year, everyone else has to just live with that. (There is no reason to think it would feel like meeting demand for social housing. Shadows, traffic impacts, neighborhood character changes, etc. are the same either way). Commodification would be an incredible improvement!
This isn't so far fetched. Much of the world lives in overpopulated dystopian slums. Kuala Lumpur is covered in walls, spikes and barbed wire. Rio de Janeiro walls off their favelas: https://assets.rbl.ms/14235733/980x.jpg
The question with many cities is the same - is it worth saving? A lot of any city's downfall is often the fault of its older residents. Why do the poor stay? Why do the rich not focus on changing it? Why do communities fail to fix it together?
The obvious answer seems to be moving to somewhere nearby that's cheaper and roomier. But people seem very resistant to this for some reason.
San Francisco is nowhere near overpopulated. We have the tech and the money for perfectly civilized mid- and high-rise buildings. We just choose not to use it.
Postwar sprawl is grossly underpopulated which makes SF seem like Kowloon by comparison, but it’s still lower density than a standard European capital.
Well, I mean for homeless people or startups, it's a lot cheaper at the fringes. Cities like Sydney have a "greater" area that extends about 1-2 hours drive away. Which seems like a lot, but if they're driving Uber at night to pay the bills, it might be a better deal.
That's all well and good that you disagree, but SF has 13.4% persons under 18 compared to the national average of 22.6% [0]. There are very few kids / families.
You say something mathematically precise and then switch into a vague "very few". Take some walks around the parks and go people watching, you will get a better feel for what that "very few" can mean.
I was restating the line you quoted, and yes precisely SF has very few families compared to other cities in the US. A sister comment seems to indicate that even NYC is 24% (I haven't verified this.) So even for similar urbanization levels SF has very few families.
My point isn't about in comparison to other cities, it is more, does a smaller rate really mean "few" and how much of a problem is it really. It's not the problem that the most negative naysayers will claim. Note I didn't say something like "affordability poses no problems for families". Because it does. But there is indeed a vibrant community.
Agree that good community doesn't necessarily equal large community.
I live in Boston, which I believe is somewhere around 17%, and in the central neighborhoods I lived in, percentage of households with families was < 10%. Despite being small, it was a "good" community in that you got to know many of the other families in the neighborhood, I coached local sports, etc. It didn't feel small because of the density of the area AND people were generally on foot or transit and not driving. Running into a family we knew was a daily occurrence. All of those things contributed to making a small population feel much better.
Census is dated. I can vouch there are a lot more families now in the city. Hospital baby birthing rooms are filling up - there is a legit surge of babies in the city right now.
The crowd arguing with me might say that a bunch of those babies will move to the east bay or similar by school age. And many will. But it's still a very good place to raise kids and grow up.
What's curious: this stat actually fails to represent quite how many parents from more normal surroudning communities bring their kids into SF because of the co-op school opportunities there. SF has done a lot of work to make co-op schools work, so lots of people with kids under 9 (myself included) find outright superior education options by bringing our kids into SF. It does involve putting parent hours towards the school, but many people with young kids are already geared for less raw hours towards work (either through superior economic resources or local support; everyone who can't hack it relies purely on the public systems).
So let's build more facilities to help deal with the homeless problem rather than whining about why we can't just ship them off to an even bigger city, the way the rest of the western US does?
We cannot stop other cities from doing this to us. So we are going to have to stop whining and cope.
Having lived here for 20 years, I can say things are a great deal better than they were before the Downtown tech explosion that happened 10 years ago. Market was filled with pushers you would only now only see on 6th St, and I literally saw a drive-by shooting (resulting in murder) on Mission at 19th (Beauty Bar). Both of those things are unthinkable today.
I feel like people are forgetting how bad things use to be.
I lived there ten years ago, too. You’re remembering selectively.
Yes, the Mission has gentrified and mid-market is a bit cleaner. But now there are widespread homeless camps, and open defecation and needles (formerly isolated to certain neighborhoods) are everywhere. And it’s not as if the Mission crime has gone away - it’s just further south now.
Property crime is up; even in SOMA, broken car windows were an occasional thing. Now it’s every day. Twin Peaks overlook is a robbery hotspot, and some guy was shot and killed for a camera up there not too long ago.
If you only ever visit the gentrified tech zones of SF, you’d be excused for thinking things have improved, but there’s no way to argue about it objectively.
In my observation, this argument, at best, is only describing things as marginally better than pre-2010 build up. But fear not: SF is a Gold Rush town that rises and fades 10x to the rest of the nation during every economic build up. It's not "tech", it's just the way our central banking system works.
Murder is down, but non-violent crime (burglary, theft, car break-ins, vandalism) is way, way up. San Francisco now has a higher property crime than any large city in the United States. Literally the worst in the nation.
Not to mention, the trash, used needles, and human feces now covering the city.
I spent a few days in NYC recently and I could not believe how clean the city was compared to SF. The difference, at least where I explored, was amazing.
I'm from Chicago and spent a third of my life in NYC. I'm honestly amazed at how clean NYC is.
The first time I ever saw a ticker-tape parade after the Yankees won the world series in 2000, I assumed NYC would be covered in paper for months. Everything was completely covered in paper! By the next morning you couldn't tell anything happened. Not a single scrap of paper anywhere on the streets or sidewalks.
Same thing after the annual West Indian Parade. After the parade, the streets of Canarsie are absolutely taken over by people partying, dancing, drinking, the floats pass back through the neighborhood, and it's just complete chaos. Next day: like nothing happened.
They have garbage cans on every corner, and most are managed regularly enough. My wife is from Queens and she constantly complains about how hard it is to find a public garbage can in Chicago. I never realized it before, but she'd absolutely right.
Also their snow is handled far more efficiently - even if you don't have an alderman or police chief on your block.
NYC is definitely dirtier than Chicago, but it's pretty damned clean, considering how many people there are in such a small space.
20 or 25 years ago, I heard San Francisco get described as "the Amsterdam of the western hemisphere", which put it high on the list of places I'd want to visit some day.
Sad to hear it's declined so much.
(In the mean time, Amsterdam seems to have improved a lot.)
San Francisco is a bonsai kitten. It wants to grow into a major world city like NYC, LA, or Tokyo, but its older residents are steadfastly opposed and want to keep it in a jar so it stays cute. The result is a painful deformed mess.
I don't really think city planning boards can control how cities grow. A city is a living thing. If it "wants" to grow, let it grow. If it doesn't, I don't think it can be forced.
Detroit learned the opposite lesson and is recovering in part by realizing that the Detroit of today is destined to be a much smaller city population wise than it once was and they are adjusting and "right-sizing" the city accordingly. They are concentrating on the living areas and demolishing and transforming the dead ones into parks, public gardens, urban farming, or natural land. The result will be a smaller city with a ton of really cool history and a cool "post-industrial" vernacular.
Yes I used to live there. The subway system in Boston and NYC is very badly run, but the city as a whole at least for Boston isn't bad. They do a better job with urban planning at least.
It is a conundrum that most American cities do not really support their public transit systems very well, and yet they seem to desire the kind of urban organization that basically requires a well-run transit system.
I've lived in New York. Why would anyone want San Francisco to become like that? Is NYC cheap, clean, free of homeless people? No, it is crowded, smelly, expensive, and only livable for the extremely wealthy.
The mistake here is assuming that if SF grows it must become NYC. What if it could be better? There are many other even higher density cities than NYC in the world with much better policies and quality of life. Look to those.
Right? This keeps coming up on the neighborhood FB groups whenever anyone discusses SB50 or any changes.
"We don't want to become like NYC, where are all these people going to go??"
San Francisco could double its population and still be ~30% less dense than Paris is. Let's aim for that. Paris is generally considered to be an okay place.
Here's a quick test for you. Next time you go to SF, count how many dogs you see vs children. Then compare the ratio to NYC. Then tell me again about which city is not 'livable'.
I lived in Brooklyn, during an enormous construction boom, and ended up getting driven out by gentrification as the neighborhood got overrun with high-end condo buildings.
Yea, that sucks. The edges of Queens and Brooklyn are hardly less expensive than most of Manhattan. They're really big boroughs though, and living in Flushing or Forest Hills for example is still quite affordable as is deeper Brooklyn.
But now that I think about it, it really is a matter of "when", not "if" the neighborhoods further from Manhattan get too expensive. I'll agree with you in like 5-10 years :[
No, not that much in the future. I have a friend who has lived in Flushing for many years. Not long ago they were thinking about getting a bigger apartment, but even with the equity they have, they couldn't do it. It was cheaper for them to buy a weekend place outside of the city.
Why would anyone want San Francisco to become like that?
It would be a significant improvement. NYC is far from perfect, but it has semi-affordable rents (outside of Manhattan), semi-functional transit, and much less excrement.
Nearly all of the subway lines were built many decades ago when construction costs were much cheaper. It’s basically impossible for San Francisco to ever build such a comprehensive system at this point. Consider that they just spent $2 billion on a train station that doesn’t have any train tracks serving it and was only open for six weeks before it was closed because it was found to be structurally unsound. If they do ever build the train tracks (estimated to take ten years and cost $6 billion), they didn’t build enough platforms for the number of trains they want to run.
> Consider that they just spent $2 billion on a train station
This can't be anything other than corruption or incompetence. There is absolutely no way it can possibly cost that much. The new One World Trade Center (Freedom Tower) cost about $3.8 billion, so almost twice that, but that should give you a scale... and this was done in a city not known for cheap construction costs.
SF's development and planning culture is just epically bad.
You are kidding right? The only city in US that even compares to world class cities (London, Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Sydney even Shanghai, Paris) is NYC.
SF is beautiful and amazing in its own right but world class is different. Start with public transportation to be world class.
NYC however has excellent connectivity to Long Island, New Jersey and Connecticut. I used to live in LI and my commute was pretty decent and my rent in LI was very affordable.
It's weird that technology oriented people see code/IT in terms of infrastructure, but too little from a city as such.
I'm living in Vienna, Austria which is a city consistently rated to be in the top 5 most livable cities by multiple independent evaluations.
How did that happen? A strong sense of ownership and infrastructure thinking over a _century_.
Just to mention the obvious, property prices do not exist in a vacuum and cities where property prices go through such a steep and continuous rise as in London, Moscow, San Francisco etc. are not a reflection of desirability or market forces but rather the total abdication of planning and responsibility from the local authorities.
There are dozens of things local leadership can do to fix infrastructure and living standards issues, never let anyone tell you otherwise.
Cities like SF have a strong survival bias. People who disagreed, tried to change things, etc are leaving or already left. Over time you end up with a place that’s broken and a group of people who want it that way.
It also helps that Vienna's population has been basically flat for many years.
By contrast the prior #1 most liveable city - Melbourne - has grown from 2 million 30 years ago to 5 million currently, forecast to get to 8 million by 2050, all due to mass immigration. Livability has fallen directly in line with population growth.
I've lived in a lot of cities around the world and think there is a 'sweet spot' population number: big enough to allow the provision of niche services and the agglomeration of talent, yet not too big as to introduce costly dis-economies of scale (usually through very expensive housing and transportation.) That level seems to be about 1-3 million.
Could it be that change is painful? When people settle down, they want things to mostly stay the way it is until they die. A city in growth or decline interferes with that.
Immigration to Australia is mostly low-wage male workers from poor, non-European countries entering on student visas (the country is one of few to allow international students to work). They serve to drive down labour costs and increase cost of living pressures (water shortages in many cities for example - requiring expensive desalination).
The opposition to mass-immigration (the country is growing at about 1.6% annually, with the same annual level of immigration as the UK, a country with 3x the population) is completely justified and it is not in the long-term interests of the country or of individual Australians.
Its not only the formal mechanics - the whole system is rorted, with a lot of fraud. A Chinese businessman bribing federal politicians for citizenship is a current news item.
Finally Australia makes its way in the world by mining and selling off its fixed endowment of minerals. The rest of the economy is not particularly competitive, mostly just domestic services and real estate. More people means a smaller slice of natural resources per person. This is not theoretical - wages are flat and cost of living pressures are high in the country. Public healthcare, education and transportation are all overcrowded.
It depends what you build for. San Francisco, the dystopia as described in the article, has under a million residents. Its wounds, and that of the bay area in general, are entirely self-inflicted.
I'm originally from Vienna too and now living in London and I can see the differences very well, but the main reason why Vienna is rated so highly is because the population has remained mostly consistent for a long period of time.
However, Vienna isn't without its faults. In Vienna you have a huge segregation between better and worse off people. You have a lot of low income people living in places like the 10th district and people in higher income brackets living in Doebling for example. This is counter productive in the long run as it will slowly create "ghettos" and mono cultures within the city. In London the wealth gap is much higher than in Vienna and yet people live more closely together. You can walk down a millionaires street one second and in the next moment be surrounded by council housing. In my opinion this is much better, as it prevents places from turning into ghettos and helps to keep the city in a sane state. There is a lot of gentrification happening in some parts of London too, but this is more of a side effect of the consistent growth rather than segregation.
The other problem which I see is that the average person in Vienna does not own any property. Most people are in rental properties for most of their lives and they mostly rely on a future state pension in order to retire. To me this is a fragile system, because it forces the country/makes it reliant on a highly taxed middle class. It is extremely difficult to prosper from middle class to being rich in Vienna - for the better or worse.
The entry barrier to creating a new company and the huge amount of regulation also makes it extremely unfriendly for startups and innovation.
Long story short, socialist cities in a capitalist Western country only thrive as long as the population is small enough and stable for a long period of time. It takes many years to build new schools, hospitals, GPs, train lines and bus routes, whereas it takes only a few weeks for an individual family to settle in a new place. If a city undergoes a massive growth in population then it doesn't even matter if everyone who moves into the city is a hard working high tax paying person, because the new money which they bring in will not be able to keep up with building the necessary infrastructure to comfortably accommodate everyone. It will take decades to catch up and only if there ever will be a slow down of growth, otherwise it will be a never ending chase.
The author draws a very unsubtle if not direct line between housing costs and homelessness. Is there any? I was under the impression that most of the homeless are mentally ill and/or transplants from other areas. What percent of them just can't afford the rent?
This, and other statistics like it, are really disingenuous and framed for a very specific interpretation. Here is the actual quote from the article (strikethrough is in the original - not sure why - maybe a bad stat ?):
"The vast majority of the people who are homeless today used to be housed – in San Francisco. According to the city’s 2015 homeless count, 71 percent of the people on the streets were living in San Francisco when they lost their housing. That means seven out of ten homeless people used to be your neighbors – before the tech boom and the eviction epidemic. "
So the presentation here is that average-joe-normal-churchgoer was minding his own business as a lifelong SF resident and was then evicted by an evil landlord, so his apartment could go to a techie, which sent him into a downward spiral to homelessness.
I have not done independent research into this myself, but I have a suspicion that the actual narrative is something like:
"borderline mentally healthy individual moves to San Francisco because it's interesting and fun and romantic (and warm) and, while still on their meds, manages to rent a room or an SRO or something, lives there for a month or two or six, runs out of either money or meds or familial support (or all three) and suffers their financial/emotional/mental breakdown here, on our streets, far from any support or family they have, if they had any at all."
If this suspicion is correct, it doesn't imply we shouldn't be compassionate or helpful or progressive in our responses, but it does suggest that we are importing problems and should consider how we might limit that tendency.
It also does not place some kind of moralistic "maybe they shouldn't be doing drugs in the first place" judgement on people - at the end of the day it is indeed a mental health issue. Just maybe it doesn't need to be our mental health problem.
Thank you for posting the actual link - that is helpful. From that link:
"Survey results show that 71% of respondents were living in San Francisco when they became homeless, and of those, 49% had been living in San Francisco for 10 years or more."
This sheds very little additional information. This statistic is often presented as if 71% of the homeless had their own apartment before they became homeless, but for all I know (and what I suspect) is that many of these people were "housed" in very tenuous, precarious situations that I might, personally, find indistinguishable from homelessness. We really need to know the specific definition of "housed" used in this survey.
That 49% of those 71% were physically present in SF for 10 years or more also tells us very little. I am led to believe that homelessness and the mental illness(es) that lead to it are cycles and that people fall in and out of ... the statistic, however, is presented as if individuals were happily housed in a plain old apartment for 10+ years before lightning struck and they were suddenly strung out on the street...
Seriously, get off the internet and go volunteer at St Anthony's for an hour. You'll get to meet some representative sample of the homeless in San Francisco and gain a much more high resolution picture on what all the various causes of homelessness are. The picture is complicated but it's not at all what you're positing.
I guarantee if you spend a week working with the homeless in San Francisco, you'll meet at least some people more intelligent than you, people who at one point earned more money than you, people who are more mentally composed and happy than you. You won't meet all of them in the same person but you'll meet at least one example of someone who can disprove every single simplistic pet theory about homelessness ever proposed.
You're talking past me to a prototypical "person who (you) disagree with". To wit:
- I made no comments about homeless people being uninteresting or unintelligent or how much money they do, or did earn, etc.
- I have presented no pet theories about the causes of homelessness or the demerits of the homeless.
I have simply pointed out that a very, very commonly published and cited statistic is, in my opinion, very ill defined and probably misused. I also suggested a possible alternative narrative that I suspect is more correct.
Please don't put all of the things you hate into a box and then shove me in there with it.
"Seriously, get off the internet and go volunteer at St Anthony's for an hour."
According to that, 71% of people on the streets of SF used to be homed
The data does not say that. It says that survey responses claim they used to be homed there; there was no verification done whatsoever. Of course vagrants are going to claim they belong there.
I had a coworker ask me if there’s any chance that losing everything you’ve ever held dear and being forced to live in such a scary environment might lead to some of what we perceive as mental illness. I think he’s onto something.
The effects of trauma are lasting and real and I’d imagine there’s a healthy amount of trauma being created in homeless encampments.
Its not really "what we perceive as mental illness", it's just a mental illness. It doesn't have to have an innate biological component to be a mental illness.
40% of American's cannot afford a $400 emergency. For those without a family / friend support system something as simple as a car accident, hospital stay or losing their job could quickly lead to living on the street. I think the vulnerability of low income people is very underestimated for those who don't have a safety structure such as family etc.
There are many sorts of homeless people. Many wouldn't be able to support themselves no matter how cheap housing is. There are many who wouldn't be homeless if housing was cheaper. This last group is the one typically targeted by laws against sleeping in cars at night. It's hard to give percentages, though.
It happened to some friends of mine, who were normal mid-low tier middle aged tech workers and who actually were born in the area. They made a few bad choices and ended up on the streets in their 40s. One of them killed herself.
There seems to be lots of people as you say, but I'm sure if rent was cheap, that would help out a lot. I dunno if you've ever been to the SF Bay Area, but rent is REALLY high. The only reason I stayed as long as I did was I had rent control.
The problems listed by this guy are real: the nimbyism of property owners is insane, and the city bureaucracy (pretty much everywhere in the area -Berkeley was particularly lol) is completely bonkers. I'd also point out that civic groups that should help things, like various homeless advocates, generally seem to make things worse. At one point there was an actual $1000+/month subsidy which paid people to remain homeless. You'd lose it if you got housing! I'm pretty sure Newsom got rid of it (to much howling), but it really stuck with me.
The article omits SB 50 [1], the effort by Scott Wiener (state senator from SF) to increase housing density and remove regulatory hurdles for housing development near transit.
From what I’ve seen it’s the most promising method to increase housing supply CA-wide given that many municipalities resist development.
Here’s what I don’t get. The real struggle seems to always be against local governments and the residents. The residents all know how jacked up it is and have good ideas for fixes, but constantly butt heads against their city.
Somehow everybody knows this, but votes in people who increase the power, scope, and responsibility of the local government which works against their interest?
Not sure what you mean exactly. A lot of the issues are people “protecting their neighborhoods” from development and preserving the “feel”. People generally are voting against policies that would raise inventory of housing, which is really the only way to reduce its cost.
There is the issue: people know how to solve the problem, but to many voters it is directly against their personal interest.
They do need to watch out though: there is nothing about San Francisco (or any other area) that means the rich need to live there, or you need to move there to get rich. (unless you are into mining for wealth where you obviously need to be where your mineral is). If some other area becomes hot the people in San Francisco have the most to lose: your house that you paid so much for and work so hard to protect the value of has the farther to fall. When/if the bubble collapses those in more reasonable areas who voted for policies that keep property values reasonable (ie allowing more development and/or not driving people out) won't fall as far.
> people know how to solve the problem, but to many voters it is directly against their personal interest.
The thing is voting to preserve the feel of their neighborhood is in their personal interest too. They like the area they live in and simultaneously want to see some of the problems solved. The issue is these are in conflict because pretty much everyone else is also making the same decisions so everyone fights to protect 'their' piece of SF hoping they're not the ones who will have to change and move (because they can't afford to in a lot of cases) to densify SF.
Well to start saying everyone agrees on something is never right but it's also just that even if you know something needs to be done doesn't mean you agree/support a) the tax increases that would be needed to fund projects X/Y/Z and b) are willing to be the person that has to have their neighborhood change (NIMBYish).
Supporting affordable and dense housing development somewhere in the city is easy but then someone has to either agree to have it be them that sells their house and moves or get forced to by the city to have THEIR neighborhood change.
I also think there's also skepticism that allowing them actually meaningfully changes the renting situation because each individual project generally has mostly very expensive 'luxury' apartments. And the answer that 'well we'll basically have to cover all but the richest areas in these multistory dense apartment complexes to actually meaningfully impact the market' is understandably not satisfying to people who like the city they live in now.
Automobile-based suburban sprawl is the only functional development pattern in the US because we’re so bad at building and maintaining public transit systems.
And for growth, you get to pick a mix of growing out, in and up. San Francisco proper obviously can't sprawl, so it needs to grow in and up. And the surrounding suburbs need to start doing their part too.
Although a bit overdramatic at times, there is so much truth on this article. I wish i could do more than upvote it.
“Crowded thoroughfares such as Market Street, even in the light of midday, stage a carnival of indecipherable outbursts and drug-induced thrashings about which the police seem to do nothing.”
This really touched me because the police in SF, if you ever see one, look disinterested at best.
Homelessness and mental health issues leading to homelessness aren't really an issue the police can address alone. Housing is indeed a big part of the problem; other cities (New Orleans for example) have had excellent results relocating formerly homeless people into inexpensive apartments.
Maybe you haven't been harassed or panhandled while walking in SOMA and had the police just watch and ignore, but that is an issue the police can help with.
I've also seen the police help, but it's few and far between because there are so few police on the streets in SOMA.
It's not that the police are bad, that they are the cause, or they are the only solution. I think the police are probably underfunded, understaffed, and under supported; the issue is more systemic then specific as the author states.
I've lived in New York City for about 25 years in three different boroughs, and as as a member of the "arty bohemian gentrifier" class I was in transitional low-income areas and things like occasional street crime, gunshots and stuff like that were not unusual.
But only once did I actually see two street people start a knife fight on a subway train and it was during one of my probably less than five short visits to SF. It's equally rare that I'd agree with a National Review writer but SF was really ugly and quite unsafe feeling. Manhattan in the late 80s was probably a little more comparable to that. But I can't imagine why anyone would want to live in SF nowadays, if you're in tech you should aspire to work remotely and live anywhere you want.
maybe 1/2 of my friends from college live in SF. I have a huge social network here. Objectively the city is not awesome, but I can't imagine moving somewhere else and starting from scratch. Lots of tech workers are in this situation IMO.
Isn't it normal to graduate college and move to another city for a job? I've never heard of anyone wanting to stick around the same city as their college friends before. Granted the Bay Area is a tech hub so that's a reason to stay if you're in the industry but living in a new city on your own is definitely an experience most people should have.
Only 25% of US adults have a bachelors degree. Of the 25% of those with bachelors degrees, the large majority come from regional public schools, think "Cal State Sacramento", or "Northern Illinois University". Graduates of these types of schools often grew up within 2 - 3 hours of their university, and after school the majority end up in the largest city within a 2 - 3 hour drive of their university. If you didn't get a degree, you're much more likely to live close to where you grew up.
If you went to a top school (top 25 - 50 in USNWR), then your social circle was much more "mobile" than average.
That makes sense. I don't have a degree but my social and professional circles are from top schools and the like. I was missing the view that a lot of people go to university in the same town they grew up in (although I question if that's the case for SF/the valley).
It's very possible that the parent commenter did just that. I know it's true in my case, as a CMU grad a plurality of my college friends moved to SF right after college. It was a new city for most of us, and nearly a decade later the majority of my local social network are still friends from school.
At this point I would be somewhat saddened to move away from a network I've been building for ~15 years.
The silver lining here is that fewer people will be present when the next big one comes and wipes out the city (predicted to occur in the next 500 years).
It makes sense societally to spread out innovation centers in a number of areas to reduce catastrophic risk.
The elites of SF and many people on HN are caught in this loop:
1. Companies don't take personal responsibility when they do antisocial things, claiming they can't be blamed, since they are just following incentives in order to compete.
2. Companies follow incentives, and lobby government to incentivize the behaviors that make them the most money (even if those behaviors are antisocial).
3. Government, influenced by the belief that the only way to do things is incentives (since regulation risks losing companies to other jurisdictions) gives companies the incentives they ask for (even when those incentives incentivize antisocial behavior).
4. GOTO 1.
We cannot trust markets to regulate the behaviors of companies. There is little to no benefit to any company, i.e. investing in ending homelessness when they can simply wall off their campus and prevent the homeless from entering. Companies might choose one or two social issues to do good on for marketing purposes, while creating equal or greater harm in other areas. Until SF (and indeed, the rest of the world) becomes more willing to regulate companies, things are only going to continue on their current trajectory.
One thing most people don't realize is that citizens own corporations. Retail investors (anyone with retirement accounts) own or are beneficial owners of the majority of public company common stock. And as shareowners, you have rights.
So, you can change this loop if as a shareowner, you change what happens between steps 1 and 2 by engaging with those companies.
While I applaud your intentions and effort, you're basically hoping that we can start trusting companies to self-regulate if we ask them to do so nicely.
I suspect any change in spending habits you might see from companies would fall under what I mentioned:
> "Companies might choose one or two social issues to do good on for marketing purposes, while creating equal or greater harm in other areas."
So in this case you'd see companies saying, "Look how transparent we are about our lobbying! Look how we're only lobbying for carbon emissions regulation!" Meanwhile they've bought up a massive campus and put spikes on the sidewalks to prevent the homeless from sleeping there, and pay 75% of their workers minimum wage.
And that's even if the disclosure of their political spending gives an accurate impression. It's quite easy to publicly spend to support an anti-carbon-emissions bill that will make a councilman's career, in order to buy that councilman's vote against the housing bill that would hurt your business. In the disclosure, it looks like your political spending was anti-carbon-emissions, when in reality it was anti-homeless.
It's not plausible for average citizens to become educated and do enough research to catch companies doing this in every case: there are too many companies and it's too complex. It's the job of politicians to do that research and regulate accordingly, and we need to empower them to do that, and elect politicians who will use that power effectively.
The only way out of this that I can see is to not allow companies to spend on politics at all--voters have the sole right to determine our politics, and that right needs to be protected from corporate spending.
What sort of regulations are you looking for? I’m just not sure how regulating a company will end homelessness. Seems like the government should be using taxes to do that.
Well, to start, you have to close loopholes which allow corporations to dodge taxes to even be able to collect taxes to begin with. I'm not sure where you're drawing the line between regulation and taxation; they go hand-in-hand.
I don't have enough context to say what's the best regulation to end homelessness in SF, as I have lived more in NYC area and am more familiar with NYC-specific problems than SF, but some ideas:
1. Require builders to build a certain percentage of low-income housing for every unit of high-income housing they build.
2. Require property owners to fill properties in a certain timeframe, rather than leaving properties empty waiting for a high-paying tenant, or simply keeping them as an investment.
3. Higher minimum wage so people at the bottom can afford housing.
4. Require a smaller pay gap between highest-paid and lowest-paid employees of a company (this addresses the corporate threat that if they are forced to pay higher minimum wages, they'll just raise their prices--the money for minimum salaries comes out of CEO's salaries instead of inflation).
Where I disagree with the MBAs who say this is the underlying belief, that companies can't be blamed for their actions. They can and should be blamed for their actions.
When an individual behaves amorally, we put them in jail. When a company behaves amorally, we say "companies are amoral, we can't do anything about it!" If companies really are amoral, then we should treat them as a threat just like we treat amoral people as threats.
The companies are also the ones trying to build the new housing atop that laundromat, or open that ice cream shop.
I’m not sure how you could read TFA and come away with companies need more regulations? True or not it seems besides the point.
The soul of SF is empty as long as the laws and regulations of the city serve only the wealthy. The policies of the overwhelmingly democratic city have created a festering menagerie of wealthy post-IPO wunderkin and drugged homeless masses. The people that used to live in that city now drive 3 hours to get to their medial job in the city cleaning, catering, delivering, or transporting the rich urbanites.
SF has a minority of VCs caught in this loop. You're talking about the folks 40 (okay well it's a Tuesday at 7am, so 90) minutes south driving on 280.
To seamlessly conflate them is not my experience, and I have been working in SF for over 10 years in startups in various stages of creation or acquisition.
Companies are not the problem, San Franciscans are the problem. By all accounts, Texas regulates companies less than California. But Texas is at the national average in cost-of-living adjusted poverty rate, despite being a majority-minority state, while California tops the charts in poverty: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevor.... As compared to California, Texas also has much higher rates of home ownership and lower unemployment for Hispanic people, with a lower Hispanic-White gap on both metrics. (The home ownership rate for Hispanics in Texas, 55%, is closer to that of Whites in California, 62%, than to Hispanics in California, 42%.)
I spent almost two weeks recently in east Texas. I was shocked. It was a more diverse and egalitarian place by a good margin than San Francisco or Palo Alto. Everyone shopping at the same stores and eating at the same restaurants. Versus my memory of Palo Alto, where you’d only see whites and Asians in one place, and Hispanic people over in East Palo Alto (or in service jobs). It’s the difference between a functional, integrated society and a broken one.
You must have visited a relatively "blue" urban area. What you describe doesn't match the reality in most of the rest of the state. And while there are pockets of segregation and racism in Northern California by and large there are very few places as diverse as the Bay Area on Earth, much less the rest of America and particularly the south.
Houston's answer to affordability is sprawl, which has some big problems of its own. But add housing they do, something the Bay Area has failed miserably at.
Fun fact: the Houston-Sugarland Metropolitan Statistical Area (“MSA”) is 50% more dense than the San Francisco-Oakland MSA. But the former is still vastly more affordable.
Huh? Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land has 6,892,427 people living in 8,258 mi^2 for a population density of 834 people/mi^2 [1]. San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward has 4,727,357 people living in 2,474 mi^2 for a population density of 1,910 people/mi^2 [2]. That's remarkable, given the fact that the Santa Cruz Mountains make a lot of the land unsuitable for development, while pretty much everywhere around Houston that isn't part of the Gulf is suitable for sprawl.
Also fun fact: Los Angeles easily beats both regions, with 13,353,907 people living in 4,848 mi^2 for a population density of 2,755 people/mi^2. L.A. is a lot more dense than people think.
Weighted density is a better calculation, in any case. With those figures the sprawl of Houston becomes even more apparent: SF comes in at 2 of 34 (plus L.A. at 3 and San Diego at 9), while Houston is ranked 23 [4].
I grew up not far from Houston. Say what you will about Texans, but urbanists they are not. :)
Where in Texas were you? I live in Austin, which is rapidly becoming a landing spot for Californians looking to get away, and my experience in Texas has been quite different than yours.
Segregation was physically built into the planning of the city of Austin[0], and it's pretty apparent if you spend a significant amount of time here. Not only that, but rising cost of living in Austin keeps pushing minority communities further and further from the city.
The social scene is pretty similar to what you're describing in Palo Alto as well. Tech is overwhelmingly white and male, and the social scene around the industry reflects this.
I'm not going to argue that companies are the only problem, but job creation that only benefits highly skilled labor and leaves the rest of the community out to dry causes, or at the very least exacerbates, several of the problems outlined in this piece.
It's a system that has benefited me tremendously, but as I get out of the tech community "bubble" and explore more of Austin, I see a lot of parallels between SF and ATX. My fear is that SF is just ahead of the curve.
Well, segregation is definitely a part of Texas. But what I think he/she was saying was that blacks and hispanics could shop and eat at the same restaurants and shops that whites and asians shop and eat at. Of course they won't live in the same areas, as you said, segregation is a part of life in Texas. But there is more mixing is what he/she was getting at I think.
Having grown up near-ish Austin and now living in SF, I agree that SF is just ahead of the curve. There's nothing special about Texas that makes it immune to de facto segregation caused by history and NIMBYism. In fact, Texas government is significantly more dysfunctional than that of California. If Houston (or Chicago for that matter) had followed the same economic path as SF, it would have ended up with the same problems. The idea that rich people in Texas are somehow more virtuous is laughable; talk to people from Plano sometime.
I lived in Houston and the surrounding areas for a good long time. (Three of four hurricanes.) I would argue that what you left out is the fact that Eastern Texas has a more evenly distributed racial makeup than places like the Bay Area. Yes, maybe they have some hispanics and blacks in the Bay Area, but it's not quite like a place like Harris county for instance where you literally could have an even mix of all three. Along with a large foreign contingent of arabs, asians, and africans. (I would even bet that Harris county along with a surprising amount of eastern texas is actually majority minority. I'm not sure, but it sure seems like it.)
At any rate, if you tried to do business the way they do it elsewhere as a retailer or restaurant, you'd go under. There is just not the population numbers that would allow you to do that. This is not to say you don't have areas that make the San Fran model work. (Just visit Rice Village if you want a sort of "authentic white/asian elitist experience".) But most businesses are going to need to be open to serving everyone. Because like I said, it really did seem like most of the people, at least in Houston area, were either hispanic or black.
(I'll admit that my view of Houston was coming from the perspective of a small town Wisconsin farm boy type. So it's entirely possible that Houston is not majority minority. But it really did seem like it to me.)
EDIT:
Just looked it up. Harris county, and a lot of east texas is, indeed, majority minority. It's about 60% black and hispanic. It's about 31% white. So, yeah, it wasn't just my imagination or my upbringing.
There are numerous factors in play, and I don't think you can conclude that regulation is the only factor in play here. Texas is dealing with a much greater supply/demand ratio of a key resource: land. Given a wealth of resources, nearly any system would work--that doesn't mean the system is better.
Until SF becomes more willing to regulate companies...
Alternatively, SF (and the rest of the world) could stop accepting lobbying as an acceptable practice, and your loop breaks. ;)
Lobbying is the problem. Asking for more regulations when there are still opportunities for the big companies to get what they want through lobbying will never solve the problem.
> Cities are nearly immortal; though they decline, they rarely die.
Cities great and small die all the time. Ur died, Babylon died. SF will die. Cities die when their purpose no longer justifies their expense. And the purpose of most cities is concentrating people to facilitate trade. But increasingly there’s nothing to do in SF, especially for the masses. If people don’t figure out something for these people to do, SF will definitely die.
That was for dramatic effect, if you will ;). SF isn't exactly a legendary human habitation like Ur or Babylon. There are thousands of cities that have come and gone since Ur and Babylon, just because they stopped "making sense" their inhabitants.
Good criticism of my post. Here's a more extensive list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_city. So when the author writes "they rarely die" it seems to me like the author has a serious historical blind spot. But why do we need to only talk about "great cities?" Why aren't all the "ghost towns" of the wild west a good enough example?
Because people tend to distinguish between "cities" and "towns." There are a lot of ghost towns, but few ghost cities. Once a settlement becomes large enough to be called a city, it is rare for it to die.
Yeah, the 20th and 23rd most populous cities in the US are "dead". The millions of people that live in Detroit and Baltimore, the tens of millions who rely on those cities for their livelihood, all the people who live there and the children being born there, all dead.
I feel like sometimes people don't read their own comments before they click "reply".
I think this issue / attitude is a major problem with the US. Both Detroit and Baltimore have over 600k people living there, a lot of whom don't have the option to just pack up and go. To claim the cities are dead is a disservice to the very real adults and children living there. If the nation dropped its war on drugs and instead waged a war on poverty those cities would be able to thrive in a generation or two.
Those cities were more like nations and the city fell when the civilization did. If we're using Ur and Babylon in reference to the complete abandonment of SF, we would need the entire American nation to collapse and be abandoned as well. Without that, SF will "die" the way Rome did or the way Detroit did. Not the way Ur or Babylon did.
I'm sorry, I should have provided more context. Here's a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_city that includes the kinds of cities I'm thinking of. Many of these cities declined and depopulated due to climate change, economic factors, etc. Ie the same kinds of factors that are affecting SF and Detroit right now. Cities don't just die because their nation falls.
How many of those were from post-industrial societies in a stable developed nation with a population of nearly a million people supporting a metro area of nearly 10 million people?
Because what I'm seeing on that list is ghost towns, nomadic civilizations, or a complete civilization collapse. What I don't see is a city the size of San Fransisco in a civilization as powerful as the United States of America completely collapsing and disappearing from the face of the planet like Ur or Babylon.
It’s interesting how this guy cherry picks examples. He mentions Sam Altman but declined to mention how Y Combinator is relocating to SF. And there are incubators and small companies etc. not saying there’s no negative trend but this articles comes off as a biased rant vs a more balanced perspective, which given the title i suppose is fair just not compelling.
This is a National Review opinion article offered as a news piece (as they are wont to do). It features a seamless conflation of SF's problems with Silicon Valley's somewhat corrosive lobbying effects on the urban expansion problems of SF, as if they're the same thing.
It suggests that San Francisco's housing problem is NOT directly at the feet of the folks who own the majority of the property, and instead implicates... uh, let me just check the article again... "Baby Boomer civil servants [acting] as urban taxidermists stuffing and mounting a dead city so it always resembles the past."
The implication of that paragraph is that it's democratic "regulation" that is halting SF's expansion, but if you live in the city you're looking at the recent unsuccessful public/private partnership building projects wondering why building codes aren't stricter (I'm looking at you, ridiculous Salesforce(tm) transbay terminal). The implication that it's bureaucracy and not a bitter generational argument between young and old residents about "preserving the city" vs. "meeting the housing demand" is likewise absurd; it's SF citizens as a whole that are debating how to proceed. A republican governance wouldn't be better off here, except it might find more alignment with property owners (who benefit enormously from this state of affairs) instead of less.
It suggests that SF doesn't have culture, but that's wrong. It has tons of culture, but it's not accessible to rich white people hoping to stroll through like tourists. You can still access it if you code yourself correctly, but if you roll up with merino wool shoes and $800 vest over a tech t-shirt and iWatch, you're not gonna make a lot of progress because people will avoid you.
But if you are that person, it's not like there aren't a dozen hopeful artists lurking around the edges of popular rich mission spots hoping to get your spare $20s. It's not like public spaces don't exist for you.
Most humorously, it features at least one nationally reviled industrialist who has increasingly had a hard time finding anyone willing to work with him anywhere where Software Engineers make good money. Thiel avoids popping up in SF because people don't like his politics here and would rather he retreat back to his bubble in orange county. We don't, strictly speaking, need his money. We have enough money, we need to build up the will to use it to solve the problems we have more acutely, but that are shared in kind with every city that's finding a way to prosper in an era where many other cities are struggling to recover from even more acute decline.
This article is everything I'd expect from a National Review piece about SF. It is confused about the geography, tone deaf to the politics, quick to blame local government for problems brought about by citizens, and steeped in the popular meme that "art is dead because I don't see marble busts anymore" memes that sound like they're fresh out of a PragerU video.
People cite them as news precisely because they don't clearly label themselves as an opinion provider. You're going to have a hard time convincing me that the word "opinion" never occurs on their site or printed media by accident.
> But somewhere in the bureaucratic hierarchy faceless city functionaries administer labyrinthine regulations that benefit the rich over the poor, the old over the young, the here over those to come, the past over the future.
One would think that, given this article comes to us from the National Review, this would be presented as a positive.
Jokes aside, the city and really the Bay as a whole are unlikely to change much. Prop 13 goes unmentioned in the article, somehow, though it remains a core part of the problem; so does the tendency for tech companies to build their headquarters on the peninsula or the west side of SJ. One would think that with the extraordinary amount of wealth floating around the bay that there would be some effort put into making the place better for everyone, ie. the old "changing the world for the better" idea that presumably drives a lot of startups, but I don't see it.
The standard for tech seems to be avoiding the hard problems of politics and long-term local issues that require campaigns and consensus rather than code and servers. I remember finding it striking a couple years ago to see that on the list of corporate sponsors for https://www.spur.org/, Microsoft was donating more money than Google. Perhaps there's another non-profit dedicated to urban planning in the bay that Google prefers to support, but I haven't heard of it. Apple could have considered building their HQ closer to public transport, but last I checked decided to go with tacking on a set of ugly massive parking structures to set the backdrop for their nice shiny new building.
I'm not really sure what should be done. The transient nature of many people that live in SF/the bay means they're unlikely to have an interest in city/area politics, much less take action on it (if they even can - several of my co-workers are on various kinds of visa). I'd guess that in the coming years tech will wax and wane but never really fade and the wealthy will gradually retreat from the public sphere and areas, surrounded by an ever-increasing array of private software functions that replace public services for those that can pay.
It’s not a homelessness crisis. Homelessness is a symptom. Our cities are in the grips of a heroin & meth epidemic. Until we acknowledge that, it won’t get better.
1) Affordable housing
2) Population density
3) Reasonable work-home distances
You get to choose 2 of the 3 constraints. Much of California's political situation is about people believing they can buck the constraints and have it all. You cannot, as long as there's free movement in this country. People come here for jobs, and the old residents demanding that the constraints all be met is causing things to go down the toilet. And people are getting angry at the failure of government to take a position against fantastical thinking and actually solve the problems.
311 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 307 ms ] thread> True revolution would involve curbing the authority of the San Francisco Planning Commission. If Democrats in the city or in Sacramento actually cared about the poor or the environment (density is green), they would enact a land-value tax and establish a redistributive policy to align the interests of the city, current residents, and future citizens. Strong government housing policy could spur growth and redistribute the city’s wealth fairly. But most of all, the freedom to build and experiment is the engine of Silicon Valley dynamism. Allow the experiments of the few to become the prosperity and fulfillment of the many, and the city could thrive once again.
They can't bring themselves to mention Proposition 13, somehow.
But damn, California ... time to put that wealth-transfer tax for the old, rich, landed elite to bed already.
Prop 13, despite benefitting landlords and commercial property owners more than homeowners, has an unfair reputation of keeping "grannies" in their homes in face of unfair taxation. Mention repeal of Prop 13 for commercial property, and even otherwise sensible people will start saying how heartless it is to ignore the plight of grannies, since this inappropriate connection is so strong in the collective psyche.
From what I can tell, Prop 13 seems generally popular[0], but could see an argument that it exacerbates the housing shortage in the Bay Area, so not sure which way you're pointing.
[0] https://www.ppic.org/wp-content/uploads/ppic-statewide-surve...
It does drive up housing costs. It also distorts commercial transactions weakens, local control, and generally casts a large shadow over, well, any conversation about taxation and anything taxation touches (like real estate) in California.
With that said, it's reasonable to expect them to propose reforms to prop 13 that preserve its core intent but cut back on the death spiral it encourages.
If Democrats in the city or in Sacramento actually cared about the poor or the environment
It's a completely useless way to preface any statement, signalling useless text to follow.
See what I mean?
Politicians dissemble, lie, act hypocritically, mislead voters, and... did I leave anything out? If you want to change their actual behavior, you have to change their incentives. One way to do that is to get the voters to hold their feet to the fire, to get them to act consistently with the values that the voters elected them to embody. (Which gets us back to "X is acting inconsistently..." being a perfectly valid thing to say.)
But the problem can run deeper than that. The voters themselves may mouth certain values, but actually desire things inconsistent with those values. At that point, the politicians are embodying the desires of the voters; the problem is the voters' hypocrisy. Once again, though, pointing out the hypocrisy is about the only way to try to attack the problem. (Changing the voters' incentives would almost always require the voters' acquiescence...)
[0] https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-sac-skelton-democrat...
Did the author ever actually walk in SF? The homeless mostly stay in the flats, the hills are fine (and higher rent of course).
Posts and comments in threads like these cause me to not want to participate on internet communities as my experience in reality seems to not match up with the cavernous anxiety taking place online.
[1]http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/San-Francisc...
Society needs a change. The lower classes need a raise.
The lower classes may get a raise but so will the ones above them to compensate and eventually cost of living just goes up to match the previous status quo.
Trash everywhere downtown, human feces/needles/smell of urine all over downtown & SOMA, depressing mix of aggressive and zombie-like homeless, very few kids/families, very few minorities (especially African-Americans), barely functioning public transportation system, high rents forcing six-figure earners to live with 2 roommates and still pay $2500/month, 400 sq ft studios going for $700k, every other non-tech worker is an Uber driver/Instacart Shopper/DoorDash delivery person
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-re...
I live in Atlanta where the minority population is much higher all around and I don't get the sense at all that there's rampant racism or discrimination.
Is this problem unique to the Bay Area or is this largely white guilt?
But to you question, diversity in tech has little to do with the ethnic makeup of the Bay Area. This is a transient town...people come here to work from all over and it's a completely separate issue.
Back in the mid-20th century, the Fillmore was a thriving black community, with around 50k black residents in a relatively central part of the city.
The city, however, considered it "blighted." Too many homeless people, too much drug use, too much property and violent crime.
And so the SF Redevelopment Agency decided to knock down a bunch of blighted Victorians, relocate the black population, and replace the Victorians with modern apartment buildings.
That was the beginning of the end of African American SF. Obviously some relocated to other areas of the city, but just as many left for other pastures.
Housing policies since then have hardly helped the situation, but YIMBY types need to understand the history of redevelopment both so they don't make the same mistakes and so they have empathy for when poor folks in a community are skeptical of their promised land.
While true, this elides over a pretty large issue with minorities in tech. In general, the "transient after college" phase, where high potential students move to high potential areas is a privileged position that most people aren't able to participate in for many reasons. Maybe its because your parents (or brothers/sisters/nieces/nephews etc) are struggling and you need to take care of them day today, maybe its because you already have student loans up to the hilt and feel that living at home is a less risky proposition than moving across the country to a place where rent is going to be 2x the size of any paycheck you've ever received, maybe its because you feel the community you come from needs you more than you need a tesla. In general, the types of people who have these types of issues that drive them not to migrate are going to be high performing, but lower wealth, and thus on balance more likely to be non-white all else being equal. IMO, a great way to help make "tech" a more diverse industry would be to open offices in Atlanta, a city with a large black population, and a very good university.
I think what you're seeing is intellectualized social liberalism and what many call "virtue signaling." Many of the residents of SF harbor intellectual views that are very liberal but are not willing to support policies that actually help the poor or disadvantaged minorities if those policies conflict with any other priority they might have (like protecting the valuation of overpriced real estate).
BTW the left has no monopoly on this kind of hypocrisy. Driving through an ultra-conservative region of West Virginia a while back I saw two billboards on opposite sides of the road. One said "Lust: a path straight to hell!" and had a Bible reference. The other advertised a combination strip club and adult bookstore. The region has massively high rates of alcoholism, drug abuse, teen pregnancy, domestic violence, and many other vices, but many of the residents of such regions are pretty self-righteous about how much more Godly they are than the heathens in places like California and New York.
I have found that self-righteousness tends to coincide with hypocrisy.
Also, people need to stop accusing others of virtue signalling, because they're just virtue signalling about being above virtue signalling.
She said that you find just as many racists everywhere, but she “appreciates” the (urban) Southern racists ones more because they don’t try to hide, so she knows where she stands.
Some of the best racism I received was in your face “sand n-word” type — it was easier to digest and joke about after the fact.
I'm sure there are plenty of racists everywhere, but I do find it hard to believe that there aren't more percentage-wise in the south.
My own view is that everyone is prejudiced. But people are different. Some are prejudiced and loud mouthed. Some are prejudiced and liars. Some are prejudiced and just quiet. But everyone is prejudiced, so does it matter if one is more loud than the other?
I mean, if you go into a room full of pregnant high school girls, sure, some are loud mouthed. Some are liars. Some are quiet.
But there are no virgins in the room.
I see a lot of people who sort of cultivate a barrier of ignorance because their bread is buttered by the system. They do their job but, only semi-consciously just won’t peer behind the result of their actions.
So I will meditate a little on your position. Maybe I’ve got the wrong bias here.
The difference is what you do with it. If you treat someone poorly because of your prejudice about their skin color instead of giving them a fair chance, then you're racist.
But I questioned if the feeling that "everywhere is equally racist" is valid, or if the south is actually still more racist, but all the loud racists make it harder to spot the quiet ones, compared to an area that's filled with quiet racists instead.
It doesn't matter if they say the racist thought out loud and then act on it, or they just act on it. Both things are racist. Magicians use misdirection to hide what they're really doing, and I'm suggesting that quiet racists in the south hide their activities by letting the loud racists take all the attention.
That said, I've lived in the south all my life and heard plenty of racism of many different kinds. I lived in Cali for 1.5 yrs and didn't hear much at all, and because I'm white I didn't experience much, either.
The only incident that I recall was being told that I walked through a neighborhood that was very dangerous to white people. I didn't feel threatened, and I don't even think I saw any people there. But I was told later that I should never walk there again, for my own safety. To this day, I don't actually know if that neighborhood really was dangerous to white people, or if the white person I was talking to was just being prejudiced.
However, I did notice that while people talked nicely and smiled, people weren't actually being any friendlier than back where I was raised. They were just hiding things better.
I will say that the majority of racists I've actually met have been middle- to upper-class. I've always thought this was kinda weird.
I'm not an expert either, just sharing my experiences.
This the most unexceptional, unoriginal wrong talking point that always comes up in these conversations. I've heard it my entire life growing up in the south, and it constantly betrays the OP's actual experiences when dealing with this matter.
It's a southern apology. And a really dumb one at that, fueled by a bitter "us vs. them" mentality ripe everywhere in the south.
There is absolutely no data point supporting this position. Not one. People who live in cities and metro areas are consistently significantly less racist than people who grow up in homogeneous communities, especially compounded if that community is a rural one. What fits both of those criteria? Generally the south.
I already said I was no expert, and described my own experiences.
There's likely data to back this up: https://www.theroot.com/forbes-10-cities-where-african-ameri...
Isn't that statement prejudiced and discriminatory toward people living in the South? You're doing exactly what it is you're accusing and entire geographic region of doing.
Why do you think there are more racists in the South? Why do racists believe what they do? I suspect the answer is the same to both those questions.
Mississippi is 40% African American. Of course there are racists down there as there are any where else, but you have any idea how hard it would be to function in Mississippi with that demographic make up if people were half as racist as the South is alleged to be? You'd think they'd be uncovering clandestine mass graves of black people every other week or worse down here s2g. I cannot and will not get over the blackest part of America being labeled "Trump Country" and used as the scapegoat for all of the nation's bigotry. It's fucking lazy victim-blaming. We are the poorest, least educated, and most vulnerable part of the country. Shitty rich people with shitty agendas own our governments, as they have for decades and decades, and the rest of the country sure does get off on telling us our hardships are our own fault.
Yes, it sucks that the South is seen as backwards and ignorant. But until we stop electing people who promote racism and prevent social programs that would help people escape poverty, we're going to continue being seen that way.
I'm not saying that racism isn't out of control in the rest of the country. I'm merely saying it's worse in the South still.
I've heard this exact statement in a Dave Chappelle standup bit. I've always taken it to mean that bigots in some areas are simply familiar enough with the area's politics, history and justice system to feel comfortable saying openly bigoted things without fear of repercussion.
What does this even mean?
???
Uh, you don't notice any racial bickering in Atlanta?
Not saying it's only in Atlanta. It's everywhere, all over the nation really. I'm just wondering where in Atlanta you live that racial bickering is absent in public discourse?
I am really interested in this. Could you provide some links, please?
https://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/hidden-monuments-to-r...
There were also redlining practices and things like razing and redeveloping the predominantly black Fillmore making it a neighborhood the previous residents could no longer afford.
https://www.epi.org/publication/the-color-of-law-a-forgotten...
Long story short:
Richmond grew during WWII because it was a large ship building yard for the pacific fleet. Lots of white and black people moved to Richmond from the South and East during this time. After the war, the ship building stopped, and the workers needed to get new jobs. There was a large auto plant that opened up in Milpitas (near San Jose), that hired a lot of the workers, both black and white. There were a lot of "whites only" suburbs built near the Milpitas plant and a lot of the white ship workers moved there, bought houses, had short commutes to work, and built wealth through housing appreciation. As white folks left the Richmond community and black folks remained, the lack of political power held by black folks at the time (Jim Crow laws, discrimination, etc) lead to disinvestment in the richmond community (poorer schools, roads didn't get repaired, leading to lower property values etc). The disinvestment and community decline made it more difficult for the black community to move away, because they didn't have any housing wealth compared to neighboring communities (and many communities at the time were "white only"). Additionally, the black workers commuting to Milpitas to work spent 2.5 hrs/day commuting, while the white workers spent like 15 minutes, so thats 2 hours and 15 minutes every day for 25 years that white fathers could spend at home teaching their kids to read/focusing on their education, improving their house, building social connections/capital etc that the black fathers didn't have. That impact on the next generation compounds over time and makes a material impact on the potential of the next generation.
"Many communities were white only" is a crock; in fact, Milpitas in the 1970s had higher black propensity than did Fremont to the north or NE San Jose to the south. Both Milpitas and Ayer High schools had more black students than Piedmont Hills to the south. The foothills tended to be pricey and almost exclusively white and Jewish, but that was economic rather than code segregation.
By the 1970s, production at the plant spiraled downward, shifts were cut, abd there were always more workers than hours.
In the context of this argument, I think it's worth distinguishing between private and public actions. People have the right to be racist, governments don't.
When you say "minority population," are you referring to white people or some other minority group in Atlanta, or are you referring to black people, who constitute the majority ethnic group in Atlanta?
1) I don’t know what “aggressive political rhetoric” is, but it comes off as being dismissive of political opinions you disagree with
2) SF the city is a small part of the SF Bay Area. There are lots of black folks living near SF
3) Be very careful making projections about racism from your experience of Atlanta. Atlanta is the catch basin for successful black business for a large fraction of the south. I was born in Atlanta, and was really surprised when people would describe the south as racist, because my experience of race in Atlanta was so positive. But you don’t have to get very far out of the city to experience poorly concealed racism.
3. I use Atlanta because that's where I live today. I've lived in Texas, Hawaii, Korea, Maryland, Wisconsin, Ohio, Alabama, and Georgia.
1. Large Asian population. The SF companies I've worked at often had 30-45% Asian workforce. In theory this should be a good thing as far as diversity goes (and I have had the privilege of learning from and getting to know people coming from very different societies on a personal level, most of them Asian). But for a variety of reasons I'm not going to dig into, Asians don't count as "diverse" anymore.
2. Overwhelmingly left leaning workforce means that the prevailing liberal attitudes are amplified and go largely unquestioned. This sometimes even manifests itself as the organized exclusion of those that don't harbor the same politics: https://www.fastcompany.com/3067152/lessons-in-techs-past-di...
3. Perhaps as a result of #2, many in the SF Bay area aren't exploring non-discriminatory explanations as to why there are few African Americans in Bay area tech companies. First off, the Black population is not very big in the Bay area. Less than 2% of mountain view's population is black. Overall the Bay area is 6.7% black, about half that of the country as a whole. Couple this with lower rates of educational attainment beyond high school (which is usually necessary for software development roles) and it's not hard to see how a lower black population in Bay area tech roles can happen even absent discrimination in hiring. But saying these things to my coworkers would probably adversely affect my career, so the prevailing narrative of discrimination in hiring is left unchallenged.
This results in some interesting behavior. Tech roles with lower barrier to entry like help desk support are now nearly entirely black, Hispanic, or female. We recently recategorized physical security as a "tech" role (ostensibly because physical security is an important part of infosec) and now easily 70%+ of our physical security staff is black. This has sort of backfired in a sense, the few black developers I know report being consistently mistaken for security or help desk personnel.
What percent of SF Bay area tech workers grew up in the Bay area? If it is not high, it is not clear that the Bay area's general population racial demographics are relevant.
It's true though, if more of us went to local government sessions, we could probably just utterly dominate the discourse and reject a lot of NIMBYisms outright, and that'd probably result in a lot of political changes.
I myself regret bitterly how much I let my parent's culture influence my opinions on this, and it's only as I get older that I fully appreciate the many toxic and counter-productive ways my fundamental christian socialization has influenced me even as I've struggled to move more left throughout the course of my life.
Most of us actually exert very little influence in local politics, precisely because we're here for the work. I'm in a tiny minority that's decided to "settle down" and not retreat "back home" once I've got a quarter million in investments and another 100k in cash.
And in fact, I think very few of my peers are super into local politics. Even I'm guilty of being somewhat disengaged until recently, and I'm trying to make up for that now in Daly City.
The property owners moving in sync are what dominate a lot of features in this town, and very few "hackers from this site" are actually in that club. Even the rare post-exit folks like me. The truth is that they have a lot more to gain by keeping the status quo than itinerant tech workers have to lose by just leaving rather than dealing with the difficult problem of entrenched NIMBYism.
I'm dealing with that now in my area and it is AGONIZING to sit there listening to some old man or woman go on about how Asians and Brazilians ruining the community and stealing their parking when they're the ones renting out 3 homes in the first place.
I don't think it's inevitable though, so the question is - how do we stop it? We have some of the brighter minds in tech on this forum, what are your thoughts?
How to stop it and create a city where anyone can live:
- build world class public transit
- double the number of houses but decommodify the housing market as much as possible with lots of social housing and controlled rent increases
I'm not too sanguine about the possibility of either of those things happening in the United States. Public transit has always kind of gone nowhere in this nation outside of the great coastal cities and Chicago. And as for the housing proposal, I can already hear the howls of "SOCIALISM!!!" that will be raised by certain very powerful interests and political parties.
I'd say if "building a city where anyone can live" is the highest goal, that's an issue in and of itself.
Would you want to work for a company "where anyone could work?"
What do you have in mind? The stanford elites get to live in san francisco, and the less-elite get shipped elsewhere?
>The price of a commodity good is typically determined as a function of its market as a whole: well-established physical commodities have actively traded spot and derivative markets. The wide availability of commodities typically leads to smaller profit margins and diminishes the importance of factors (such as brand name) other than price. [0]
If anything, housing is not enough of a commodity. Each site effectively has a bespoke regulatory framework that has to be discovered as expensively as possible, through a series of planning meetings. Each project requires an extremely high-touch political consensus process. Each building is expected to be unique-but-not-too-unique for its context, of-the-present-moment without altering historical character. As a practical matter, it's really expensive and take a long time and many iterations to arrive at a design that everyone agrees meets those criteria. Watch an SF Planning meeting video sometime. Most of the multifamily projects discussed on any given day are continuations. The curation process yields a great-looking museum, but we pay for the delay and uncertainty it creates in the price of admission.
Houses should be less like houses and more like soybeans: cheap, abundant, with many highly competitive producers and a price that floats just barely above the cost of production. Producers should be responding quickly and effectively to changes in demand, just as in the commodities markets. Commodities are the things we're most likely to have enough of for everyone!
Housing has effectively one producer, the San Francisco planning commission, and if it doesn't feel like meeting demand this year, everyone else has to just live with that. (There is no reason to think it would feel like meeting demand for social housing. Shadows, traffic impacts, neighborhood character changes, etc. are the same either way). Commodification would be an incredible improvement!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity
The question with many cities is the same - is it worth saving? A lot of any city's downfall is often the fault of its older residents. Why do the poor stay? Why do the rich not focus on changing it? Why do communities fail to fix it together?
The obvious answer seems to be moving to somewhere nearby that's cheaper and roomier. But people seem very resistant to this for some reason.
Postwar sprawl is grossly underpopulated which makes SF seem like Kowloon by comparison, but it’s still lower density than a standard European capital.
Because that requires money.
I am raising my kids here and disagree with your assessment. There is a pretty good community of families here.
[0] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/sanfranciscocit...
13% of 800,000 is about 100,000. Very few.
My point isn't about in comparison to other cities, it is more, does a smaller rate really mean "few" and how much of a problem is it really. It's not the problem that the most negative naysayers will claim. Note I didn't say something like "affordability poses no problems for families". Because it does. But there is indeed a vibrant community.
I don't think there are other major cities where the population is < 14% children. NYC is around 24%.
Your view of the "pretty good community" is irrelevant. Compared to other cities, San Francisco has "very few kids/families."
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/philmatier/article/San-F...
https://www.sfgate.com/mommyfiles/article/Many-families-leav...
We cannot stop other cities from doing this to us. So we are going to have to stop whining and cope.
I feel like people are forgetting how bad things use to be.
[Edited for tappos]
Yes, the Mission has gentrified and mid-market is a bit cleaner. But now there are widespread homeless camps, and open defecation and needles (formerly isolated to certain neighborhoods) are everywhere. And it’s not as if the Mission crime has gone away - it’s just further south now.
Property crime is up; even in SOMA, broken car windows were an occasional thing. Now it’s every day. Twin Peaks overlook is a robbery hotspot, and some guy was shot and killed for a camera up there not too long ago.
If you only ever visit the gentrified tech zones of SF, you’d be excused for thinking things have improved, but there’s no way to argue about it objectively.
Not to mention, the trash, used needles, and human feces now covering the city.
The first time I ever saw a ticker-tape parade after the Yankees won the world series in 2000, I assumed NYC would be covered in paper for months. Everything was completely covered in paper! By the next morning you couldn't tell anything happened. Not a single scrap of paper anywhere on the streets or sidewalks.
Same thing after the annual West Indian Parade. After the parade, the streets of Canarsie are absolutely taken over by people partying, dancing, drinking, the floats pass back through the neighborhood, and it's just complete chaos. Next day: like nothing happened.
They have garbage cans on every corner, and most are managed regularly enough. My wife is from Queens and she constantly complains about how hard it is to find a public garbage can in Chicago. I never realized it before, but she'd absolutely right.
Also their snow is handled far more efficiently - even if you don't have an alderman or police chief on your block.
NYC is definitely dirtier than Chicago, but it's pretty damned clean, considering how many people there are in such a small space.
Sad to hear it's declined so much.
(In the mean time, Amsterdam seems to have improved a lot.)
I don't really think city planning boards can control how cities grow. A city is a living thing. If it "wants" to grow, let it grow. If it doesn't, I don't think it can be forced.
Detroit learned the opposite lesson and is recovering in part by realizing that the Detroit of today is destined to be a much smaller city population wise than it once was and they are adjusting and "right-sizing" the city accordingly. They are concentrating on the living areas and demolishing and transforming the dead ones into parks, public gardens, urban farming, or natural land. The result will be a smaller city with a ton of really cool history and a cool "post-industrial" vernacular.
Yes I used to live there. The subway system in Boston and NYC is very badly run, but the city as a whole at least for Boston isn't bad. They do a better job with urban planning at least.
"We don't want to become like NYC, where are all these people going to go??"
San Francisco could double its population and still be ~30% less dense than Paris is. Let's aim for that. Paris is generally considered to be an okay place.
Lol do you know anyone who lives there? It has one of the highest property prices and rents in the world.
Yes I do..
> It has one of the highest property prices and rents in the world.
It's still cheaper than San Francisco.
Do you mean just Manhattan? There are five boroughs.
But now that I think about it, it really is a matter of "when", not "if" the neighborhoods further from Manhattan get too expensive. I'll agree with you in like 5-10 years :[
And Flushing is already way the fuck out there.
I fantasize about winning Green card someday and moving to USA
So have I.
Why would anyone want San Francisco to become like that?
It would be a significant improvement. NYC is far from perfect, but it has semi-affordable rents (outside of Manhattan), semi-functional transit, and much less excrement.
This can't be anything other than corruption or incompetence. There is absolutely no way it can possibly cost that much. The new One World Trade Center (Freedom Tower) cost about $3.8 billion, so almost twice that, but that should give you a scale... and this was done in a city not known for cheap construction costs.
SF's development and planning culture is just epically bad.
Yeah, I'd hate for SF to be a world class city.
You are kidding right? The only city in US that even compares to world class cities (London, Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Sydney even Shanghai, Paris) is NYC.
SF is beautiful and amazing in its own right but world class is different. Start with public transportation to be world class.
I'm living in Vienna, Austria which is a city consistently rated to be in the top 5 most livable cities by multiple independent evaluations.
How did that happen? A strong sense of ownership and infrastructure thinking over a _century_.
Just to mention the obvious, property prices do not exist in a vacuum and cities where property prices go through such a steep and continuous rise as in London, Moscow, San Francisco etc. are not a reflection of desirability or market forces but rather the total abdication of planning and responsibility from the local authorities.
There are dozens of things local leadership can do to fix infrastructure and living standards issues, never let anyone tell you otherwise.
By contrast the prior #1 most liveable city - Melbourne - has grown from 2 million 30 years ago to 5 million currently, forecast to get to 8 million by 2050, all due to mass immigration. Livability has fallen directly in line with population growth.
I've lived in a lot of cities around the world and think there is a 'sweet spot' population number: big enough to allow the provision of niche services and the agglomeration of talent, yet not too big as to introduce costly dis-economies of scale (usually through very expensive housing and transportation.) That level seems to be about 1-3 million.
The opposition to mass-immigration (the country is growing at about 1.6% annually, with the same annual level of immigration as the UK, a country with 3x the population) is completely justified and it is not in the long-term interests of the country or of individual Australians.
Its not only the formal mechanics - the whole system is rorted, with a lot of fraud. A Chinese businessman bribing federal politicians for citizenship is a current news item.
Finally Australia makes its way in the world by mining and selling off its fixed endowment of minerals. The rest of the economy is not particularly competitive, mostly just domestic services and real estate. More people means a smaller slice of natural resources per person. This is not theoretical - wages are flat and cost of living pressures are high in the country. Public healthcare, education and transportation are all overcrowded.
However, Vienna isn't without its faults. In Vienna you have a huge segregation between better and worse off people. You have a lot of low income people living in places like the 10th district and people in higher income brackets living in Doebling for example. This is counter productive in the long run as it will slowly create "ghettos" and mono cultures within the city. In London the wealth gap is much higher than in Vienna and yet people live more closely together. You can walk down a millionaires street one second and in the next moment be surrounded by council housing. In my opinion this is much better, as it prevents places from turning into ghettos and helps to keep the city in a sane state. There is a lot of gentrification happening in some parts of London too, but this is more of a side effect of the consistent growth rather than segregation.
The other problem which I see is that the average person in Vienna does not own any property. Most people are in rental properties for most of their lives and they mostly rely on a future state pension in order to retire. To me this is a fragile system, because it forces the country/makes it reliant on a highly taxed middle class. It is extremely difficult to prosper from middle class to being rich in Vienna - for the better or worse.
The entry barrier to creating a new company and the huge amount of regulation also makes it extremely unfriendly for startups and innovation.
Long story short, socialist cities in a capitalist Western country only thrive as long as the population is small enough and stable for a long period of time. It takes many years to build new schools, hospitals, GPs, train lines and bus routes, whereas it takes only a few weeks for an individual family to settle in a new place. If a city undergoes a massive growth in population then it doesn't even matter if everyone who moves into the city is a hard working high tax paying person, because the new money which they bring in will not be able to keep up with building the necessary infrastructure to comfortably accommodate everyone. It will take decades to catch up and only if there ever will be a slow down of growth, otherwise it will be a never ending chase.
https://www.sftu.org/2018/06/five-myths-about-the-homeless-p...
According to that, 71% of people on the streets of SF used to be homed, and aren’t on the streets due to drugs.
"The vast majority of the people who are homeless today used to be housed – in San Francisco. According to the city’s 2015 homeless count, 71 percent of the people on the streets were living in San Francisco when they lost their housing. That means seven out of ten homeless people used to be your neighbors – before the tech boom and the eviction epidemic. "
So the presentation here is that average-joe-normal-churchgoer was minding his own business as a lifelong SF resident and was then evicted by an evil landlord, so his apartment could go to a techie, which sent him into a downward spiral to homelessness.
I have not done independent research into this myself, but I have a suspicion that the actual narrative is something like:
"borderline mentally healthy individual moves to San Francisco because it's interesting and fun and romantic (and warm) and, while still on their meds, manages to rent a room or an SRO or something, lives there for a month or two or six, runs out of either money or meds or familial support (or all three) and suffers their financial/emotional/mental breakdown here, on our streets, far from any support or family they have, if they had any at all."
If this suspicion is correct, it doesn't imply we shouldn't be compassionate or helpful or progressive in our responses, but it does suggest that we are importing problems and should consider how we might limit that tendency.
It also does not place some kind of moralistic "maybe they shouldn't be doing drugs in the first place" judgement on people - at the end of the day it is indeed a mental health issue. Just maybe it doesn't need to be our mental health problem.
(to be clear this is from 2015, so nearing 4 years out of date)
"Survey results show that 71% of respondents were living in San Francisco when they became homeless, and of those, 49% had been living in San Francisco for 10 years or more."
This sheds very little additional information. This statistic is often presented as if 71% of the homeless had their own apartment before they became homeless, but for all I know (and what I suspect) is that many of these people were "housed" in very tenuous, precarious situations that I might, personally, find indistinguishable from homelessness. We really need to know the specific definition of "housed" used in this survey.
That 49% of those 71% were physically present in SF for 10 years or more also tells us very little. I am led to believe that homelessness and the mental illness(es) that lead to it are cycles and that people fall in and out of ... the statistic, however, is presented as if individuals were happily housed in a plain old apartment for 10+ years before lightning struck and they were suddenly strung out on the street...
I guarantee if you spend a week working with the homeless in San Francisco, you'll meet at least some people more intelligent than you, people who at one point earned more money than you, people who are more mentally composed and happy than you. You won't meet all of them in the same person but you'll meet at least one example of someone who can disprove every single simplistic pet theory about homelessness ever proposed.
- I made no comments about homeless people being uninteresting or unintelligent or how much money they do, or did earn, etc.
- I have presented no pet theories about the causes of homelessness or the demerits of the homeless.
I have simply pointed out that a very, very commonly published and cited statistic is, in my opinion, very ill defined and probably misused. I also suggested a possible alternative narrative that I suspect is more correct.
Please don't put all of the things you hate into a box and then shove me in there with it.
"Seriously, get off the internet and go volunteer at St Anthony's for an hour."
I have done that all over the world.
Cheers!
The effects of trauma are lasting and real and I’d imagine there’s a healthy amount of trauma being created in homeless encampments.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/talking-about-trauma...
There seems to be lots of people as you say, but I'm sure if rent was cheap, that would help out a lot. I dunno if you've ever been to the SF Bay Area, but rent is REALLY high. The only reason I stayed as long as I did was I had rent control.
The problems listed by this guy are real: the nimbyism of property owners is insane, and the city bureaucracy (pretty much everywhere in the area -Berkeley was particularly lol) is completely bonkers. I'd also point out that civic groups that should help things, like various homeless advocates, generally seem to make things worse. At one point there was an actual $1000+/month subsidy which paid people to remain homeless. You'd lose it if you got housing! I'm pretty sure Newsom got rid of it (to much howling), but it really stuck with me.
From what I’ve seen it’s the most promising method to increase housing supply CA-wide given that many municipalities resist development.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/opinion/california-home-p...
Somehow everybody knows this, but votes in people who increase the power, scope, and responsibility of the local government which works against their interest?
They do need to watch out though: there is nothing about San Francisco (or any other area) that means the rich need to live there, or you need to move there to get rich. (unless you are into mining for wealth where you obviously need to be where your mineral is). If some other area becomes hot the people in San Francisco have the most to lose: your house that you paid so much for and work so hard to protect the value of has the farther to fall. When/if the bubble collapses those in more reasonable areas who voted for policies that keep property values reasonable (ie allowing more development and/or not driving people out) won't fall as far.
The thing is voting to preserve the feel of their neighborhood is in their personal interest too. They like the area they live in and simultaneously want to see some of the problems solved. The issue is these are in conflict because pretty much everyone else is also making the same decisions so everyone fights to protect 'their' piece of SF hoping they're not the ones who will have to change and move (because they can't afford to in a lot of cases) to densify SF.
Supporting affordable and dense housing development somewhere in the city is easy but then someone has to either agree to have it be them that sells their house and moves or get forced to by the city to have THEIR neighborhood change.
I also think there's also skepticism that allowing them actually meaningfully changes the renting situation because each individual project generally has mostly very expensive 'luxury' apartments. And the answer that 'well we'll basically have to cover all but the richest areas in these multistory dense apartment complexes to actually meaningfully impact the market' is understandably not satisfying to people who like the city they live in now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
Automobile-based suburban sprawl is the only functional development pattern in the US because we’re so bad at building and maintaining public transit systems.
* A desirable place to live
* No growth
* Affordable
And for growth, you get to pick a mix of growing out, in and up. San Francisco proper obviously can't sprawl, so it needs to grow in and up. And the surrounding suburbs need to start doing their part too.
“Crowded thoroughfares such as Market Street, even in the light of midday, stage a carnival of indecipherable outbursts and drug-induced thrashings about which the police seem to do nothing.”
This really touched me because the police in SF, if you ever see one, look disinterested at best.
I've also seen the police help, but it's few and far between because there are so few police on the streets in SOMA.
It's not that the police are bad, that they are the cause, or they are the only solution. I think the police are probably underfunded, understaffed, and under supported; the issue is more systemic then specific as the author states.
Edit: typo
But only once did I actually see two street people start a knife fight on a subway train and it was during one of my probably less than five short visits to SF. It's equally rare that I'd agree with a National Review writer but SF was really ugly and quite unsafe feeling. Manhattan in the late 80s was probably a little more comparable to that. But I can't imagine why anyone would want to live in SF nowadays, if you're in tech you should aspire to work remotely and live anywhere you want.
If you went to a top school (top 25 - 50 in USNWR), then your social circle was much more "mobile" than average.
At this point I would be somewhat saddened to move away from a network I've been building for ~15 years.
What changed?
It makes sense societally to spread out innovation centers in a number of areas to reduce catastrophic risk.
1. Companies don't take personal responsibility when they do antisocial things, claiming they can't be blamed, since they are just following incentives in order to compete.
2. Companies follow incentives, and lobby government to incentivize the behaviors that make them the most money (even if those behaviors are antisocial).
3. Government, influenced by the belief that the only way to do things is incentives (since regulation risks losing companies to other jurisdictions) gives companies the incentives they ask for (even when those incentives incentivize antisocial behavior).
4. GOTO 1.
We cannot trust markets to regulate the behaviors of companies. There is little to no benefit to any company, i.e. investing in ending homelessness when they can simply wall off their campus and prevent the homeless from entering. Companies might choose one or two social issues to do good on for marketing purposes, while creating equal or greater harm in other areas. Until SF (and indeed, the rest of the world) becomes more willing to regulate companies, things are only going to continue on their current trajectory.
One thing most people don't realize is that citizens own corporations. Retail investors (anyone with retirement accounts) own or are beneficial owners of the majority of public company common stock. And as shareowners, you have rights.
So, you can change this loop if as a shareowner, you change what happens between steps 1 and 2 by engaging with those companies.
I built this site to try and make that process accessible. For example, this NGO campaign for fund managers to require companies to disclose political spending: https://www.yourstake.org/campaign/disclose-corporate-politi...
I suspect any change in spending habits you might see from companies would fall under what I mentioned:
> "Companies might choose one or two social issues to do good on for marketing purposes, while creating equal or greater harm in other areas."
So in this case you'd see companies saying, "Look how transparent we are about our lobbying! Look how we're only lobbying for carbon emissions regulation!" Meanwhile they've bought up a massive campus and put spikes on the sidewalks to prevent the homeless from sleeping there, and pay 75% of their workers minimum wage.
And that's even if the disclosure of their political spending gives an accurate impression. It's quite easy to publicly spend to support an anti-carbon-emissions bill that will make a councilman's career, in order to buy that councilman's vote against the housing bill that would hurt your business. In the disclosure, it looks like your political spending was anti-carbon-emissions, when in reality it was anti-homeless.
It's not plausible for average citizens to become educated and do enough research to catch companies doing this in every case: there are too many companies and it's too complex. It's the job of politicians to do that research and regulate accordingly, and we need to empower them to do that, and elect politicians who will use that power effectively.
The only way out of this that I can see is to not allow companies to spend on politics at all--voters have the sole right to determine our politics, and that right needs to be protected from corporate spending.
I don't have enough context to say what's the best regulation to end homelessness in SF, as I have lived more in NYC area and am more familiar with NYC-specific problems than SF, but some ideas:
1. Require builders to build a certain percentage of low-income housing for every unit of high-income housing they build.
2. Require property owners to fill properties in a certain timeframe, rather than leaving properties empty waiting for a high-paying tenant, or simply keeping them as an investment.
3. Higher minimum wage so people at the bottom can afford housing.
4. Require a smaller pay gap between highest-paid and lowest-paid employees of a company (this addresses the corporate threat that if they are forced to pay higher minimum wages, they'll just raise their prices--the money for minimum salaries comes out of CEO's salaries instead of inflation).
0. Allow increase in supply, which fixes most other problems. Stop artificially constraining supply and allow more manhattanization.
Disconnecting them from any community they serve, work in or deal with.
Where I disagree with the MBAs who say this is the underlying belief, that companies can't be blamed for their actions. They can and should be blamed for their actions.
When an individual behaves amorally, we put them in jail. When a company behaves amorally, we say "companies are amoral, we can't do anything about it!" If companies really are amoral, then we should treat them as a threat just like we treat amoral people as threats.
I’m not sure how you could read TFA and come away with companies need more regulations? True or not it seems besides the point.
The soul of SF is empty as long as the laws and regulations of the city serve only the wealthy. The policies of the overwhelmingly democratic city have created a festering menagerie of wealthy post-IPO wunderkin and drugged homeless masses. The people that used to live in that city now drive 3 hours to get to their medial job in the city cleaning, catering, delivering, or transporting the rich urbanites.
More corporate regulation? I don’t get it.
SF has a minority of VCs caught in this loop. You're talking about the folks 40 (okay well it's a Tuesday at 7am, so 90) minutes south driving on 280.
To seamlessly conflate them is not my experience, and I have been working in SF for over 10 years in startups in various stages of creation or acquisition.
I spent almost two weeks recently in east Texas. I was shocked. It was a more diverse and egalitarian place by a good margin than San Francisco or Palo Alto. Everyone shopping at the same stores and eating at the same restaurants. Versus my memory of Palo Alto, where you’d only see whites and Asians in one place, and Hispanic people over in East Palo Alto (or in service jobs). It’s the difference between a functional, integrated society and a broken one.
If you’re going to compare SF and Texas, start with Highland Park, Bunker Hill, 78746 or the Montrose.
Also fun fact: Los Angeles easily beats both regions, with 13,353,907 people living in 4,848 mi^2 for a population density of 2,755 people/mi^2. L.A. is a lot more dense than people think.
Weighted density is a better calculation, in any case. With those figures the sprawl of Houston becomes even more apparent: SF comes in at 2 of 34 (plus L.A. at 3 and San Diego at 9), while Houston is ranked 23 [4].
I grew up not far from Houston. Say what you will about Texans, but urbanists they are not. :)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Houston#Demographics
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco%E2%80%93Oakland%...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_metropolitan_area#...
[4]: https://austinzoning.typepad.com/austincontrarian/2008/03/we...
Segregation was physically built into the planning of the city of Austin[0], and it's pretty apparent if you spend a significant amount of time here. Not only that, but rising cost of living in Austin keeps pushing minority communities further and further from the city.
The social scene is pretty similar to what you're describing in Palo Alto as well. Tech is overwhelmingly white and male, and the social scene around the industry reflects this.
I'm not going to argue that companies are the only problem, but job creation that only benefits highly skilled labor and leaves the rest of the community out to dry causes, or at the very least exacerbates, several of the problems outlined in this piece.
It's a system that has benefited me tremendously, but as I get out of the tech community "bubble" and explore more of Austin, I see a lot of parallels between SF and ATX. My fear is that SF is just ahead of the curve.
[0]: https://projects.statesman.com/news/economic-mobility/
At any rate, if you tried to do business the way they do it elsewhere as a retailer or restaurant, you'd go under. There is just not the population numbers that would allow you to do that. This is not to say you don't have areas that make the San Fran model work. (Just visit Rice Village if you want a sort of "authentic white/asian elitist experience".) But most businesses are going to need to be open to serving everyone. Because like I said, it really did seem like most of the people, at least in Houston area, were either hispanic or black.
(I'll admit that my view of Houston was coming from the perspective of a small town Wisconsin farm boy type. So it's entirely possible that Houston is not majority minority. But it really did seem like it to me.)
EDIT:
Just looked it up. Harris county, and a lot of east texas is, indeed, majority minority. It's about 60% black and hispanic. It's about 31% white. So, yeah, it wasn't just my imagination or my upbringing.
Alternatively, SF (and the rest of the world) could stop accepting lobbying as an acceptable practice, and your loop breaks. ;)
Lobbying is the problem. Asking for more regulations when there are still opportunities for the big companies to get what they want through lobbying will never solve the problem.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_improvement_district
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_improvement_districts...
> Cities are nearly immortal; though they decline, they rarely die.
Cities great and small die all the time. Ur died, Babylon died. SF will die. Cities die when their purpose no longer justifies their expense. And the purpose of most cities is concentrating people to facilitate trade. But increasingly there’s nothing to do in SF, especially for the masses. If people don’t figure out something for these people to do, SF will definitely die.
> ur died, Babylon died.
Your two examples are from 2-3 millennia ago. I would think if cities "die all the time," you would have more recent examples.
Maybe it proves the author correct that the first cities that came to mind are from 2500 years ago?
I feel like sometimes people don't read their own comments before they click "reply".
Because what I'm seeing on that list is ghost towns, nomadic civilizations, or a complete civilization collapse. What I don't see is a city the size of San Fransisco in a civilization as powerful as the United States of America completely collapsing and disappearing from the face of the planet like Ur or Babylon.
SF is antithetical to the kind of startup that YC used to be all about, for many reasons stated eloquently by TFA.
It suggests that San Francisco's housing problem is NOT directly at the feet of the folks who own the majority of the property, and instead implicates... uh, let me just check the article again... "Baby Boomer civil servants [acting] as urban taxidermists stuffing and mounting a dead city so it always resembles the past."
The implication of that paragraph is that it's democratic "regulation" that is halting SF's expansion, but if you live in the city you're looking at the recent unsuccessful public/private partnership building projects wondering why building codes aren't stricter (I'm looking at you, ridiculous Salesforce(tm) transbay terminal). The implication that it's bureaucracy and not a bitter generational argument between young and old residents about "preserving the city" vs. "meeting the housing demand" is likewise absurd; it's SF citizens as a whole that are debating how to proceed. A republican governance wouldn't be better off here, except it might find more alignment with property owners (who benefit enormously from this state of affairs) instead of less.
It suggests that SF doesn't have culture, but that's wrong. It has tons of culture, but it's not accessible to rich white people hoping to stroll through like tourists. You can still access it if you code yourself correctly, but if you roll up with merino wool shoes and $800 vest over a tech t-shirt and iWatch, you're not gonna make a lot of progress because people will avoid you.
But if you are that person, it's not like there aren't a dozen hopeful artists lurking around the edges of popular rich mission spots hoping to get your spare $20s. It's not like public spaces don't exist for you.
Most humorously, it features at least one nationally reviled industrialist who has increasingly had a hard time finding anyone willing to work with him anywhere where Software Engineers make good money. Thiel avoids popping up in SF because people don't like his politics here and would rather he retreat back to his bubble in orange county. We don't, strictly speaking, need his money. We have enough money, we need to build up the will to use it to solve the problems we have more acutely, but that are shared in kind with every city that's finding a way to prosper in an era where many other cities are struggling to recover from even more acute decline.
This article is everything I'd expect from a National Review piece about SF. It is confused about the geography, tone deaf to the politics, quick to blame local government for problems brought about by citizens, and steeped in the popular meme that "art is dead because I don't see marble busts anymore" memes that sound like they're fresh out of a PragerU video.
What? National Review doesn't do news, it does opinions. And it's pretty upfront about being conservative.
National Review was founded in 1955 by William F. Buckley Jr. as a magazine of conservative opinion.
One would think that, given this article comes to us from the National Review, this would be presented as a positive.
Jokes aside, the city and really the Bay as a whole are unlikely to change much. Prop 13 goes unmentioned in the article, somehow, though it remains a core part of the problem; so does the tendency for tech companies to build their headquarters on the peninsula or the west side of SJ. One would think that with the extraordinary amount of wealth floating around the bay that there would be some effort put into making the place better for everyone, ie. the old "changing the world for the better" idea that presumably drives a lot of startups, but I don't see it.
The standard for tech seems to be avoiding the hard problems of politics and long-term local issues that require campaigns and consensus rather than code and servers. I remember finding it striking a couple years ago to see that on the list of corporate sponsors for https://www.spur.org/, Microsoft was donating more money than Google. Perhaps there's another non-profit dedicated to urban planning in the bay that Google prefers to support, but I haven't heard of it. Apple could have considered building their HQ closer to public transport, but last I checked decided to go with tacking on a set of ugly massive parking structures to set the backdrop for their nice shiny new building.
I'm not really sure what should be done. The transient nature of many people that live in SF/the bay means they're unlikely to have an interest in city/area politics, much less take action on it (if they even can - several of my co-workers are on various kinds of visa). I'd guess that in the coming years tech will wax and wane but never really fade and the wealthy will gradually retreat from the public sphere and areas, surrounded by an ever-increasing array of private software functions that replace public services for those that can pay.
https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw
It’s not a homelessness crisis. Homelessness is a symptom. Our cities are in the grips of a heroin & meth epidemic. Until we acknowledge that, it won’t get better.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SnapCrap-app-San-Fran...
You get to choose 2 of the 3 constraints. Much of California's political situation is about people believing they can buck the constraints and have it all. You cannot, as long as there's free movement in this country. People come here for jobs, and the old residents demanding that the constraints all be met is causing things to go down the toilet. And people are getting angry at the failure of government to take a position against fantastical thinking and actually solve the problems.