People have been hating yuppies since as long as the concept has existed. This is nothing new at all; it is standard distrust, fear, or dislike of people who are perceived as different.
There exists a certain segment of the population that will always consider newcomers (less charitably called 'outsiders') as an intrinsically bad thing. These people should be ignored; they cannot be satisfied by doing anything but giving in to them.
(I don't live in SF, but I hear the same complaints about "techies" in my city, particularly in my neighborhood.)
I think it has more to do with being displaced and less with disliking people with Macbooks at coffee houses. This is gentrification, but it's the middle class being pushed out this time, not the lower class. Nobody wants to leave their favorite spot because they can no longer afford the rent.
You're right, though, that it's not new at all. This happens in most major urban cities.
The trick is that the newcomers are always blamed for rising housing costs, nobody considers that their own community may be to blame for the housing shortage.
It is unreasonable to expect your community to never grow in population or wealth.
Also, I think you are underplaying the degree to which "disliking people with Macbooks at coffee houses" plays into it. There is a lot of wordage in that article dedicated to describing things other than rising rent that is bothering the "natives".
One example:
""Your whole social world is tech," Garcia, 37, said as he finished a bagel sandwich at the Creamery, a cafe at Fourth and Townsend that's a hotbed of tech deal making.
"The reality is that there are real people in San Francisco, but they're usually in neighborhoods like the Richmond or Sunset," he continued. "The wall between them and us, so to speak - not to get too postcolonial about it here - is pretty high.""
Here the "native" has decided that "tech people" are somehow less "real" because they are unlike him. People like Garcia might try to dress up their issue with "tech people" as merely a matter of rent and economics, but what it really boils down to is bigotry.
Yes, exactly. A lot of the folks in this scene are just unlikable people. I'm "part of the problem", and even I don't like a lot of the startup people who I encounter on a daily basis in SOMA or the Mission.
If I have to put it into words, there's been a tangible shift from "let's do something interesting together with this cool new thing" to "how can I get rich with this thing?", and that transition makes everyone else feel like a tool for your personal advancement.
If I have to put it into words, there's been a tangible shift from "let's do something interesting together with this cool new thing" to "how can I get rich with this thing?", and that transition makes everyone else feel like a tool for your personal advancement.
Yes, exactly. You're hitting it right on the head in this thread.
Every group has their fair share of unlikeable individual. It is the act of a bigot to confuse those unlikeable individuals as representatives of their group.
Like it or not, everyone is a representative for whatever scene they're in. We're all ambassadors, and in this case, we're ambassadors for an industry that is easy to characterize as heartless and imperious.
You read that backwards: Garcia is a tech person, and is being self-deprecating when he refers to them as less real people. Whether it's ironic self-deprecation, or sincere sadness and disappointment at the situation, I can't tell.
This is true, and many of the problems I see in SF had like-for-like counterparts when I was living in London (replace 'tech' with 'finance', etc).
That said, I think SF has some unique circumstances that make gentrification challenging. These cause genuine problems that aren't related to simple fear of change. A few of those circumstances:
* SF has a very poor public transport system that severely limits where people can choose to live in relation to their workplace
* SF has problems with homelessness and poverty that are more visible and proportionally higher than its peers (SF has one of the highest rates of homeless people who actively refuse shelter)
* Tech workers often flee the city to have families, meaning they aren't as engaged with the community as others (this exodus also has detrimental effects on the school system in SF)
It's sad though, to think that tech could ever be considered the new finance.
We're supposed to the LSD experimenting, sandal wearing, authority deriding rebels. That's why we're rooted in San Francisco to begin with.
> We're supposed to the LSD experimenting, sandal wearing, authority deriding rebels.
> We're threatening our own existence.
Erm...no. You are choosing to define tech as either " LSD experimenting, sandal wearing, authority deriding rebels." or in another post as "autistic male industry.". This is a definition that works for you. I choose not to be associated with any of these definitions. I have no interest in either craft beer or comicon or any of those typical American nerd past times. Hell, I studied high school in a sub culture where girls were automatically supposed to be good at Math or CS.
My point is that it ultimately is just a job. Go do the job. There will be people who will stereotype you and make you part of some club whether you choose to be part of that club or not. Ignore them, help the world if you choose to.
I couldn't agree with you more. We need to step up and change the averages of this industry.
There will be many benefits if we do, for our society, for our industry, and for us too. In the meantime, you and I will be in the minority.
I was speaking a bit tongue in cheek about the lsd and sandals, but nevertheless believe we need to work hard to encourage a quilt of diversity: in style and scenes, approaches to the world and epistemology of learning, academic pursuit, politics, local business etc. I aimed to identify the low hanging fruit, where we're most of out to lunch. And the lack of women in our midst is certainly #1 on the list, imo.
I don't think so. I think the reality is that the "yuppy" stereotype is much more malleable than people think. It only conjures up the image of a young guy with slicked back hair in an expensive suit talking about models and bottles because that was the most apt caricature of the investment bankers in, e.g., Manhattan. In SF, though, it's going to start conjuring up images of the coder typing on a Macbook in a coffee shop while casually dressed, talking about his startup ideas.
This is why I disagree with Crito and think the fundamental issue here is economic, not bigotry. The bigotry is just a concentration of vitriol against the offending party, and it morphs to reflect whatever that offending party might look like. There's a lot of emotional pain in being displaced. It's going to create resentment against those who are perceived as doing the displacing.
It only conjures up the image of a young guy with slicked back hair in an expensive suit talking about models and bottles because that was the most apt caricature of the investment bankers in, e.g., Manhattan. In SF, though, it's going to start conjuring up images of the coder typing on a Macbook in a coffee shop while casually dressed, talking about his startup ideas.
Those are superficial differences. You know what actually matters? Whether he will defend the reputation of a whistleblower in the face of power. Whether he will fight when he finds out that women are getting paid 15% less in his company. Whether he'll push hard for an environment that prevents managerial abuses. That's the shit that matters, not whether he wears a hoodie vs. a suit.
On the serious moral stuff, the modern incarnation of Silicon Valley is just so fucking conventional and submissive to authority that, as far as I'm concerned, it has forfeit its right to live.
Aye, those things are certainly problematic. I think that people disturbed by those things need to consider directing their outrage and effort at the causes of those problems, and solutions.
Tech people who can afford commutes are not the cause of poor public transit, they just serve to highlight it. Upper-middle class tech workers are not the reason that there are so many homeless in SF, they just provide start contrast that makes the homeless problem highly visible.
Getting rid of tech people so that these problems are not as apparent is not a well considered solution.
I think - and this is only based on my own experiences, so please do correct me - is that a lot of the problems discussed here are exacerbated by the effective geographical segregation of tech workers with families and those without.
One of the complaints here is that in the Mission tech workers aren't engaging with the local community - schools, playgrounds, and the like. But this isn't a general problem with tech, because if you walk 10 minutes to Noe Valley you'll find many tech workers actively involved in their communities because they have families that live there.
This is compounded by the fact that many people in tech who decide to start a family will often move out to the valley to take advantage of better schools, and more appropriate housing.
"One of the complaints here is that in the Mission tech workers aren't engaging with the local community - schools, playgrounds, and the like. But this isn't a general problem with tech, because if you walk 10 minutes to Noe Valley you'll find many tech workers actively involved in their communities because they have families that live there."
I'm not really sure about that. SF hasn't exactly been a family-friendly place for the time that I've lived here, and I wouldn't describe the giant packs of 20-something, nerdy men who have come with this latest gold rush as engaged members of their community. But Noe is definitely a different neighborhood than SOMA, so you probably see more civic engagement there than elsewhere in the city.
However, I can say with 100% confidence that the city has become less interesting and more homogenous since 2008 -- much more white, 20-something and hipstnerd. Many of the things that I found culturally interesting in San Francisco have been pushed out by the skyrocketing costs of living here. Artisan drop coffee and bougie grilled cheese shops aside, Oakland seems like a far more interesting place than San Francisco these days -- nearly all of the art, music and counter-culture that made SF dynamic has moved to the east bay, replaced by a shallow, consumeristic version of the same.
However, I can say with 100% confidence that the city has become less interesting and more homogenous since 2008. Many of the things that I found culturally interesting in San Francisco have been pushed out by the skyrocketing costs of living here.
Could you perhaps list a few of these "culturally interesting" things that existed in the pre-2008 period?
Because I am left puzzled as to what was so vibrant back then. I have lived on and off in the Bay Are since 2001 and in SF since 2005 (in Potrero ,Lower Nob not Tender-Nob. Hell no! Not Tender-Nob. If you think it is a cesspool now, you should have seen it back then).
Whenever I read "culturally interesting", alarm bells go off because it is usually a couched way of culture peddlers saying, culturally interesting to us - the few dozen scenesters who are so firmly ensconced in this made-up brand of stylized misfitdom. These non-tech scene people whose coolness is threatened by the addition of new recruits (and heaven forbid they be upwardly mobile technology workers) that they actively shun all outsiders, who are trying to be "more involved in city life" and "start participating in city life."
When they say that we should be "more involved in city life", what they really mean is that you should fork over more of your hard earned dollars to preserve the culturally attractive blight and color of the city, so that they could continue to make merry, uninterrupted while we sit on the outside, looking in, but never really welcomed or accepted.
> (in Potrero ,Lower Nob not Tender-Nob. Hell no! Not Tender-Nob. If you think it is a cesspool now, you should have seen it back then).
>When they say that we should be "more involved in city life", what they really mean is that you should fork over more of your hard earned dollars to preserve the culturally attractive blight and color of the city, so that they could continue to make merry, uninterrupted while we sit on the outside, looking in, but never really welcomed or accepted.
I find it hard to believe such opinion-havers are faced with a hard time fitting in with the people they interact with whose prime objective isn't 'networking to make more money.'
That's true. Yet it's an complex way of saying "the complaint is that rich people don't support poor people." In Noe Valley, the rich people have moved away from the poor people, "out of sight, out of mind", but in the Mission the rich and poor are still neighbors.
Noe Valley isn't a solution to the problem, it's just a NIMBY way of papering over the problem.
I think the most hilarious backlash is the one from folks who moved here barely three years ago. Apparently, if you don't work in tech, you are somehow more of a real person and keeping it real. Bull fucking shit.
The issue is tech-salaries are so high these days, that the once decently priced apartments of SF are now increasing beyond what their non-tech jobs can support. So even the Starbucks employee who moved into SF 2 months ago is always wondering how long he can afford to be there.
Say what you want about tech-workers sense of entitlement, or the local's misdirected anger, but I think we can all agree that this nonsense is great for sfgate's page views. And they clearly know it. They just keep publishing the same two stories over and over.
edit to add: I want a media backlash. That always comes, right? Maybe then we can get away from this nonsense narrative of tech-workers vs locals and focus on the actual problems at the root of housing prices.
If someone have a similar need or problem then someone taking lead to stir up a conversation and anger about an issue - why not? It's only really a problem when there are lies being stated, which I have no idea if there are.
The "story about the story" doesn't come until the story is rehashed and played out many many times. Milked until the only thing to talk about is the coverage itself.
(I know nothing about this subject so I am not weighing in with agreement or disagreement - only pointing out how stories play out in the press not what you are actually saying.)
"I think we can all agree that this nonsense is great for sfgate's page views. And they clearly know it. They just keep publishing the same two stories over and over."
Don't know about that, but I do know this: for every article about the tech backlash, there's a top-rated HN comment dismissing the whole thing as a cheap ploy for page views.
> for every article about the tech backlash, there's a top-rated HN comment dismissing...
That's not even a little true.
> ...dismissing the whole thing as a cheap ploy for page views.
Strawman. I didn't dismiss anything. It can be both a real issue and sfgate can be milking it for pageviews. The issue with housing prices (and the gentrification that follows) is most certainly a real issue. And sfgate is most certainly milking it for page views.
The root of the problem is that much of the tech industry is strangely old-fashioned about doing business face-to-face. This means that places like SF where the density of tech people is well above-average will attract more tech migrants, and the price of housing will rise until the market clears -- with long-time locals priced out by tech companies that pay high salaries.
As long as tech companies are willing to pay the salaries they're paying, unwilling to open up shop outside SF, and refuse to consider allowing long-distance remote employees, the problem will continue.
Source: Please consider all the job openings you're aware of, and try to keep a count of the fraction that would be closed to remote-only candidates.
with long-time locals priced out by tech companies that pay high salaries.
I hope and dearly hope that you also meant to include the Germans, Italians and Irish who constituted the major demographic of the Mission once, when you say "long time locals" and not just the recent Hispanic arrivals.
I am appalled by everyone, from the New York Times [1] to Al Jazeera [2], white-washing the facts to make it seem like what is going on in the Mission and the rest of the city is somehow a Noah's Flood-like grand sweep of gentrification that the city had never seen before.
People were displaced before. At least a casual mention of it by the media, would be nice.
"I want a media backlash. That always comes, right?"
Actually, no it doesn't. A group most of us identify with (techies) is cast as the villain of the piece. The designated villain doesn't get a reprieve. Ask anyone who identifies with any other group the press latches onto as an oppressor.
As a visitor to SF I'm having a hard time trying to understand why there is so much anger directed towards 'techies' and not towards the city/mayor. Isn't it the mayor's responsibility to ensure that housing supply can meet demand and low income earners are not pushed out of the city entirely?
No, that is not the mayor's job at all. Well it shouldn't be. If a mayor tries to make it his job, he'll fail because things like "housing supply" cannot be managed by government.
Doesn't the city effectively control housing supply by issuing permits for new buildings and controlling zoning boundaries? I can see how the city cannot produce new housing but it seems they can definitely restrict housing supply.
Governments set rules which directly affect markets - housing in particular is subject to tons of planning and manipulation by government. They absolutely can change supply.
Want to bring on more high-density housing? Change zoning rules so it is easier to get permits.
Housing regulations tend to be extremely local and I'm not a SF resident, but it is stunningly naive to claim that "housing supply" cannot be influenced by government. I realize Americans love to hate them, but city planning is one thing that governments are actually really helpful to have manage.
I think it's fair to say the majority of SF residents strongly oppose increases to housing density through rebuilding, so the mayor and the supervisors should not be defying them. If SF residents also don't like the resulting market prices and gentrification, they need to change their minds about which is worse. I think what they really want is to be a city-state that can stop the farang/Ausländers from deciding to relocate there, but in the US they can't have that.
It's not just yuppie hatred, nor does the article really address the big issues. Obviously inequality of money and opportunity is a big part of this. But that can be mitigated if society's fabric isn't threatened.
There are elephants in the room:
1) lack of women in the industry <--- means an increasingly out of whack male:female ratio in the city which has many problematic pile-on effects.
2) simple feelings of being left out...that's what people don't like about Google shuttles. They're mysterious. Let people in them, see what they are, see how they're really not that amazing or great: but then that would hurt recruiting.
3) Arrogance of many tech workers: anti-social intercommunication skills etc. We all know this is undeniably true. Sure we may be nicer than most finance types. But are we more out-going? Do we try to connect with our community on an emotional level? Certainly not more than most, and I'd argue a heck of a lot less than most.
To add to (3): we really miss the mark when it comes to trying to connect with other people's issues. Not everyone can fix their problems by "learning to code" nor does everyone want to use our binary lingo of "problems and solutions" to describe the world. We're far less interested in genuinely understanding others than in attributing our suggestions for improvement.
Ultimately this ties back to (1). We're essentially an autistic male industry.
> 2) simple feelings of being left out...that's what people don't like about Google shuttles. They're mysterious. Let people in them, see what they are, see how they're really not that amazing or great: but then that would hurt recruiting.
So your proposal is that people who don't work in tech, say someone who spend upwards of $100000 on an expensive liberal arts education and has a good sense for making good soundbites but not enough money should be allowed to enter the Google bus and drive down to the South Bay and back? It is a fucking bus that moves from point A to point B. There will be people who will hate you for anything you do. Always.
I'm saying show people the interior on a "google bus open house day in the mission" so the google bus isn't like a red velvet rope and bouncer protected nightclub --- looks pretty fancy from the outside, but not much really going on inside.
Disambiguify it and say "we're not trying to be a bunch of nightclub bouncers... we just have a large car pool"
Yes, but who are the "people" that you show things to? There is no clear split between "tech people" on one side and "locals" on the other side. Just like there are people who have been living in the Mission for 30+ years, there are people who moved in at the same time as I did (two years ago) but are getting priced out. Why am I less of a real "San Franciscan" than they are? This is as another commenter pointed, half parts bigotry too. This has always been happening too. Hell, the Mission was once occupied by poor German and Italian families. They fled with white flight when the Latinas moved here. Then, now the Mission is gentrifying. This is a process that will keep happening throughout the years in every neighborhood. A Google open house day will not help people who want to manufacture outrage for their pet causes.
I think there are people who would complain about a car pool too. Really, they just want the tech people to stay out, and anything that enables them to move in (like carpools or buses) is going to get complaints. The buses are a visible symbol, but not the root cause.
You're speaking as if it were an ego issue alone, of not wanting to be "excluded" from the Google buses. No. These people have justifiable anger at what is happening to their neighborhood and rent levels. That is why they hate Google buses-- not because they want a ride in one. Don't make them out to be children just because they're not well-off. (I'm not saying you are, but that's a common sentiment these days.)
On the contrary, children need their own buses so they can be shuttled to school despite an existing public transportation infrastructure.
These children are paid above median income, espouse libertarian ideals, refuse to participate or share, and require their own shuttle service separate from 'the natives'.
It says something that to draw 'talent', you have to implement a separate transportation system to appease their fragile sensibilities.
Uhh...way to go on stereotyping people. Because everyone who is in tech does this. There are countless tech people who take the Muni and Caltrain to work in Mountain View. Also, the shuttles are an option, designed by companies to optimize the amount of time you work. Quite a lot of people get work done in shuttles. I am not sure how this makes it the fault of the employee because they are using a benefit which exists. What is next? Complain because someone is not refusing a higher pay package just because of your silly conceptions of equality.
Nice hyperbolic and knee-jerk slippery slope response, but the complaint seems to be about the mentality of the people attracted to concept of having their employer enable them to quite literally be able to live in their own bubble, with minimal exposure to the outside and 'natives'.
No, the strawman constructed to represent these people espouses libertarian ideals and refuses to participate or share. Actual shuttle riders require the shuttle (to the degree that they really "require" it) because it drives them to work. There isn't much more to it than that.
If Caltrain or BART made the same trip and was even a tiny bit faster or more reliable most would switch in a heartbeat.
It says something about San Francisco's housing density and public transportation system that Google needs to create their transportation alternative. It's not that Google employees have "fragile sensibilities" and cannot mix with the rest of the general populace. Rather, it's that everything is spread out and it's difficult to get around using the public transportation system. There are no Google shuttles in NYC because it's more attractive to live closer to the workplace and sufficiently fast to take the existing transportation. The local residents need to accept that high tech workers are there to stay and start solving these problems.
While I support the San Francisco backlash-- it's the immune system of the city's soul-- I would normally think the Google buses are a good thing. First, it's better for the environment to have a bus than to have a bunch of people driving. Second, car commuting is awful and being able to replace the commute with useful work hours is a major plus for the workers. If I had a 1.5-hour commute each way, I'd be very appreciative of a program that allowed me to get something done with that time.
The problem isn't Google buses. It's that these tech companies don't pay any fucking taxes. The right way to solve this problem is to make them pay their damn taxes like normal people, and to use that money to build housing until it becomes affordable again (and then everyone can leave the buses alone). And if a corporation is bussing people in from San Francisco, it should pay SF taxes as well instead of being a fucking tax-evading suburbanite.
San Francisco has no worse social issues than New York, with its famously female-heavy population. Google shuttles and hipster coffee are nothing compared to stop-and-frisk.
> 2) simple feelings of being left out...that's what people don't like about Google shuttles. They're mysterious. Let people in them, see what they are, see how they're really not that amazing or great: but then that would hurt recruiting.
Those buses are private, and paid for by Google, they're not public buses. Should I let anyone from SF ride in my personal car, just so they don't feel left out? Private means private, Google&co are allowed to let in (or keep out) anyone they want on buses they pay for.
Another commenter here notes that "People have been hating yuppies since as long as the concept has existed" but as a yuppie myself, this misses something more crucial to me: the disconnect between the techno-utopian ideology of the bay area and the (apparently?) increasing divide between haves/have-nots. Something about the juxtaposition just really troubles me.
Of course, there are larger social trends happening here that complicate the picture, such as a shift in the distribution of poverty between urban and suburban areas:
There are people who say that it's okay because these technologies of convenience will eventually become affordable for everyone, essentially a trickle-down theory of technological progress. Maybe that's true.
I just want to avoid an Elysium-like scenario of futuristic enclaves surrounded by poverty-stricken shantytowns. As long as we can avoid that, I'll be much happier about building the future.
No idea really. I know quite a bunch of people who live in SF and do the South Bay trip. Enough of them spend money in the city, walk dogs for the elderly and so on. I think we are getting into "No true scotsman" territory with all this misplaced outrage.
One really serious problem with this particular topic of discussion is that people keep conflating "homeless" and "poor". Homeless people may be almost universally poor, but most of the poor are not homeless. I will go further and venture that most of the homeless are not homeless because they are poor but rather because they are either suffering from either serious mental disorders or substance abuse or both. As a consequence, the ways you solve the "poor" problem and the ways you solve the "homeless" problem are different. So it really makes sense to figure out which particular problem you are talking about.
I don't think most people realize how bad this is. It's not just a rash of bad blood. This is a turning point. The last bubble was much more unreasonable in terms of raw numbers, but it didn't have the mean-spirited aura of this one.
Even after 2001, people liked tech and Silicon Valley and wanted to see these ecosystems succeed. That was the respectable way to get rich: to move to the Valley and start a company. No more. Average people hate tech now.
The problem is that, as often happens, the wrong targets are being attacked. People are lumping the $140k/year programmers (who'll never be able to afford a house in San Francisco) in with the $250k product executives and useless scene kids working 11-to-3, much less the $2M/year lawyers who figure out how tech companies can never pay a dime in taxes, which means they're not seeing the source of the real problem.
I lived in the Mission (24th and Potrero) for years during the dotcom bubble, when I was a grad student. Gentrification was just as controversial then as it is now. As for mean-spirited auras, look at the "Mission Yuppie Eradication Project" poster in [1] that begins "Over the past several years the Mission has been colonized by pigs with money" (sounds like a michaelochurch post to me!) and ends by calling for vandalizing their cars.
People were upset about different things—instead of Google buses, lofts being converted into luxury condos and so on—but the emotions and the discourse were much the same. I remember a startup called Bigstep that got into hot water because they took over office space from a community org or something that couldn't afford the rent any more [2]. There was a lot of talk about the Latino community being displaced by dotcom types, about Marina yuppies taking over the nightlife—at places like Blowfish Sushi, plus a somehow slightly creepy experiment called Circadia [3] that Starbucks ran at Bryant and Mariposa, which was an emblem of dotcom excess. It's just an ordinary Starbucks now.
I haven't noticed any change in how "average" people feel about tech, except perhaps that its status has gone up.
One thing that actually has changed from the dotcom bubble to now is the massive shift of power away from VCs and MBAs towards founders and engineers. (Which is kind of ironic since it contradicts almost everything you say about the industry.) Investors have lost power relative to founders and managers have lost power relative to programmers. Both of those trends have been going on for a long time, but have been accelerating. They seem to me to be good trends, arguably even for the investors and managers.
Curiously, this shift is visible in the cultural ripples around the dotcoms then vs. the startups now. The dotcom bubble produced a lot of ersatz culture that matched its mostly ersatz startups. The parts of it that I saw were douchey and suity; a place like Circadia, which I mentioned above, was an expression of that. It was full of people who weren't actually working on anything. The decor was lavish, but the coffee and food (not that I could afford the food) were mediocre. Compare that to a place like Sightglass now, where the coffee is excellent and most people are working on stuff. Sure they're hipsters, but it's still a crowd I'd rather be around than the one that used to make me squirm back then; and I'm a dyed-in-the-wool programmer type who hasn't much changed.
[3] https://www.salon.com/1999/01/21/feature_238/. I sometimes worked on my thesis there because they had internet. Most of their tech-oriented image was silly, though. The place was all pretense.
I had a VC-funded startup during the first dotcom bubble, when I lived in SOMA and Noe Valley, and have a bootstrapped startup (well, a company that we sold last year) now that takes me into SF pretty regularly, and this squares up with what I've seen as well. Nobody who takes our field seriously could reasonably prefer the dotcom bubble to today.
San Francisco's problem is that it is mismanaged. That's not just a message board opinion; it appears to be the consensus of all observers, including that of journalists who cover the city. The city's services are poorly run, its growth is haphazard and pointlessly retarded, and it's hamstrung by its geography. But it also seems to be more livable today that it was in 1999, when the market was crazy enough that I had to pay my year's rent in advance to secure an apartment.
The problem is a climate that is conducive to the homeless. Here's my modest proposal: move tech companies to the rust belt. From Detroit to Utica, we have the pleasure of watching the homeless die of hypothermia every winter. Every time I see some begging scumbag on the street, I just think to myself, "thank FSM that piece of shit will have a shallow grave in 6 months." You know, because he can't afford to get put 6 feet under. Natural selection is a beautiful thing.
Step 1: Cherry-pick most extreme comments possible and imply that they represent the average opinion.
Step 2: Make numerous anecdotal assertions without any effort to back them in statistics.
Step 3: Instigate mudslinging by displaying cherry-pickings to other side.
Step 4: Feedback into Step 1.
"Since we don't understand the macroeconomic system that is causing these issues, let's just blame a random group of people who are doing well in said system."
I feel like Tech is the scapegoat for San Francisco's pre-existing problems.
It's pretty obvious by now San Francisco is one of the worst places for a fast growing tech industry. They don't want change, it's a tiny peninsula (I've walked from one end to the other), there's not enough land, taxes are high, traffic is awful, transportation is apparently awful, they're overly bureaucratic, their politics are broken (all things I've heard directly from SF natives and expats), prices and living expenses are the highest in the USA, the community is volatile towards the businesses there (compare SF to St. Louis & other cities who are passing incentive packages worth $1+ Billion just to get Boeing to bring 8,000 jobs to their city). The city looks unique, hip and trendy, and just like Vogue has more issues than anyone can count.
They're complaining about gentrification as if it's the worst thing in the world. Meanwhile in St. Louis, we're all praying for gentrification. When neighborhoods become run down and violent no one says anything, everyone just moves away. When those same people move back to fix everything up suddenly they're the villain. In St. Louis, the poor just move to a cheaper place in a nicer house using the money they got from their fixer-upper home. That's something SF natives can't really do because of SF's land size problem. I've spoken to African Americans and minorities who took part in gentrification just above Martin Luther King street and bought homes to fix them up. The world operates in much more rational, logical ways outside of the hipster-bubble. If silicon valley moves, who will SF blame their problems on then?
Pretend that Silicon Valley never existed in the bay area. Would A-N-Y of San Francisco's major problems be solved? They'd still have busted transportation, still have high rent, the politics would still be the same, they'd still ignore Oakland residents, still have a lack of housing, still have the homeless problem, and everything else. This is just another re-occurring pattern in human nature: "Blame your problems on those who have nice things."
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] threadThere exists a certain segment of the population that will always consider newcomers (less charitably called 'outsiders') as an intrinsically bad thing. These people should be ignored; they cannot be satisfied by doing anything but giving in to them.
(I don't live in SF, but I hear the same complaints about "techies" in my city, particularly in my neighborhood.)
You're right, though, that it's not new at all. This happens in most major urban cities.
It is unreasonable to expect your community to never grow in population or wealth.
Also, I think you are underplaying the degree to which "disliking people with Macbooks at coffee houses" plays into it. There is a lot of wordage in that article dedicated to describing things other than rising rent that is bothering the "natives".
One example:
""Your whole social world is tech," Garcia, 37, said as he finished a bagel sandwich at the Creamery, a cafe at Fourth and Townsend that's a hotbed of tech deal making.
"The reality is that there are real people in San Francisco, but they're usually in neighborhoods like the Richmond or Sunset," he continued. "The wall between them and us, so to speak - not to get too postcolonial about it here - is pretty high.""
Here the "native" has decided that "tech people" are somehow less "real" because they are unlike him. People like Garcia might try to dress up their issue with "tech people" as merely a matter of rent and economics, but what it really boils down to is bigotry.
If I have to put it into words, there's been a tangible shift from "let's do something interesting together with this cool new thing" to "how can I get rich with this thing?", and that transition makes everyone else feel like a tool for your personal advancement.
Yes, exactly. You're hitting it right on the head in this thread.
That said, I think SF has some unique circumstances that make gentrification challenging. These cause genuine problems that aren't related to simple fear of change. A few of those circumstances:
* SF has a very poor public transport system that severely limits where people can choose to live in relation to their workplace
* SF has problems with homelessness and poverty that are more visible and proportionally higher than its peers (SF has one of the highest rates of homeless people who actively refuse shelter)
* Tech workers often flee the city to have families, meaning they aren't as engaged with the community as others (this exodus also has detrimental effects on the school system in SF)
We're threatening our own existence.
> We're threatening our own existence.
Erm...no. You are choosing to define tech as either " LSD experimenting, sandal wearing, authority deriding rebels." or in another post as "autistic male industry.". This is a definition that works for you. I choose not to be associated with any of these definitions. I have no interest in either craft beer or comicon or any of those typical American nerd past times. Hell, I studied high school in a sub culture where girls were automatically supposed to be good at Math or CS.
My point is that it ultimately is just a job. Go do the job. There will be people who will stereotype you and make you part of some club whether you choose to be part of that club or not. Ignore them, help the world if you choose to.
There will be many benefits if we do, for our society, for our industry, and for us too. In the meantime, you and I will be in the minority.
I was speaking a bit tongue in cheek about the lsd and sandals, but nevertheless believe we need to work hard to encourage a quilt of diversity: in style and scenes, approaches to the world and epistemology of learning, academic pursuit, politics, local business etc. I aimed to identify the low hanging fruit, where we're most of out to lunch. And the lack of women in our midst is certainly #1 on the list, imo.
I should add that your attitude towards what financial workers are or should be is pretty close minded as well...
They're carpet-baggers, here for the perceived easy money, because Wall Street gorged itself to bail-out destruction.
We program the machines that affect society in ways that go completely against the ideals of counter-culture.
We are right-hand enablers of the man. Until we aren't needed, that is.
This is why I disagree with Crito and think the fundamental issue here is economic, not bigotry. The bigotry is just a concentration of vitriol against the offending party, and it morphs to reflect whatever that offending party might look like. There's a lot of emotional pain in being displaced. It's going to create resentment against those who are perceived as doing the displacing.
Those are superficial differences. You know what actually matters? Whether he will defend the reputation of a whistleblower in the face of power. Whether he will fight when he finds out that women are getting paid 15% less in his company. Whether he'll push hard for an environment that prevents managerial abuses. That's the shit that matters, not whether he wears a hoodie vs. a suit.
On the serious moral stuff, the modern incarnation of Silicon Valley is just so fucking conventional and submissive to authority that, as far as I'm concerned, it has forfeit its right to live.
Tech people who can afford commutes are not the cause of poor public transit, they just serve to highlight it. Upper-middle class tech workers are not the reason that there are so many homeless in SF, they just provide start contrast that makes the homeless problem highly visible.
Getting rid of tech people so that these problems are not as apparent is not a well considered solution.
One of the complaints here is that in the Mission tech workers aren't engaging with the local community - schools, playgrounds, and the like. But this isn't a general problem with tech, because if you walk 10 minutes to Noe Valley you'll find many tech workers actively involved in their communities because they have families that live there.
This is compounded by the fact that many people in tech who decide to start a family will often move out to the valley to take advantage of better schools, and more appropriate housing.
I'm not really sure about that. SF hasn't exactly been a family-friendly place for the time that I've lived here, and I wouldn't describe the giant packs of 20-something, nerdy men who have come with this latest gold rush as engaged members of their community. But Noe is definitely a different neighborhood than SOMA, so you probably see more civic engagement there than elsewhere in the city.
However, I can say with 100% confidence that the city has become less interesting and more homogenous since 2008 -- much more white, 20-something and hipstnerd. Many of the things that I found culturally interesting in San Francisco have been pushed out by the skyrocketing costs of living here. Artisan drop coffee and bougie grilled cheese shops aside, Oakland seems like a far more interesting place than San Francisco these days -- nearly all of the art, music and counter-culture that made SF dynamic has moved to the east bay, replaced by a shallow, consumeristic version of the same.
Could you perhaps list a few of these "culturally interesting" things that existed in the pre-2008 period? Because I am left puzzled as to what was so vibrant back then. I have lived on and off in the Bay Are since 2001 and in SF since 2005 (in Potrero ,Lower Nob not Tender-Nob. Hell no! Not Tender-Nob. If you think it is a cesspool now, you should have seen it back then).
Whenever I read "culturally interesting", alarm bells go off because it is usually a couched way of culture peddlers saying, culturally interesting to us - the few dozen scenesters who are so firmly ensconced in this made-up brand of stylized misfitdom. These non-tech scene people whose coolness is threatened by the addition of new recruits (and heaven forbid they be upwardly mobile technology workers) that they actively shun all outsiders, who are trying to be "more involved in city life" and "start participating in city life."
When they say that we should be "more involved in city life", what they really mean is that you should fork over more of your hard earned dollars to preserve the culturally attractive blight and color of the city, so that they could continue to make merry, uninterrupted while we sit on the outside, looking in, but never really welcomed or accepted.
>When they say that we should be "more involved in city life", what they really mean is that you should fork over more of your hard earned dollars to preserve the culturally attractive blight and color of the city, so that they could continue to make merry, uninterrupted while we sit on the outside, looking in, but never really welcomed or accepted.
I find it hard to believe such opinion-havers are faced with a hard time fitting in with the people they interact with whose prime objective isn't 'networking to make more money.'
Noe Valley isn't a solution to the problem, it's just a NIMBY way of papering over the problem.
edit to add: I want a media backlash. That always comes, right? Maybe then we can get away from this nonsense narrative of tech-workers vs locals and focus on the actual problems at the root of housing prices.
The "story about the story" doesn't come until the story is rehashed and played out many many times. Milked until the only thing to talk about is the coverage itself.
(I know nothing about this subject so I am not weighing in with agreement or disagreement - only pointing out how stories play out in the press not what you are actually saying.)
Don't know about that, but I do know this: for every article about the tech backlash, there's a top-rated HN comment dismissing the whole thing as a cheap ploy for page views.
That's not even a little true.
> ...dismissing the whole thing as a cheap ploy for page views.
Strawman. I didn't dismiss anything. It can be both a real issue and sfgate can be milking it for pageviews. The issue with housing prices (and the gentrification that follows) is most certainly a real issue. And sfgate is most certainly milking it for page views.
As long as tech companies are willing to pay the salaries they're paying, unwilling to open up shop outside SF, and refuse to consider allowing long-distance remote employees, the problem will continue.
Source: Please consider all the job openings you're aware of, and try to keep a count of the fraction that would be closed to remote-only candidates.
I hope and dearly hope that you also meant to include the Germans, Italians and Irish who constituted the major demographic of the Mission once, when you say "long time locals" and not just the recent Hispanic arrivals.
I am appalled by everyone, from the New York Times [1] to Al Jazeera [2], white-washing the facts to make it seem like what is going on in the Mission and the rest of the city is somehow a Noah's Flood-like grand sweep of gentrification that the city had never seen before.
People were displaced before. At least a casual mention of it by the media, would be nice.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2013/11/20/us/20131122_TECH... [2] http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/the-stream/the-late...
Actually, no it doesn't. A group most of us identify with (techies) is cast as the villain of the piece. The designated villain doesn't get a reprieve. Ask anyone who identifies with any other group the press latches onto as an oppressor.
Want to bring on more high-density housing? Change zoning rules so it is easier to get permits.
Housing regulations tend to be extremely local and I'm not a SF resident, but it is stunningly naive to claim that "housing supply" cannot be influenced by government. I realize Americans love to hate them, but city planning is one thing that governments are actually really helpful to have manage.
gotta love these generalizations...
"Future of SFGate-funded action-sports TV sitcom in doubt."
There are elephants in the room: 1) lack of women in the industry <--- means an increasingly out of whack male:female ratio in the city which has many problematic pile-on effects.
2) simple feelings of being left out...that's what people don't like about Google shuttles. They're mysterious. Let people in them, see what they are, see how they're really not that amazing or great: but then that would hurt recruiting.
3) Arrogance of many tech workers: anti-social intercommunication skills etc. We all know this is undeniably true. Sure we may be nicer than most finance types. But are we more out-going? Do we try to connect with our community on an emotional level? Certainly not more than most, and I'd argue a heck of a lot less than most.
Ultimately this ties back to (1). We're essentially an autistic male industry.
So your proposal is that people who don't work in tech, say someone who spend upwards of $100000 on an expensive liberal arts education and has a good sense for making good soundbites but not enough money should be allowed to enter the Google bus and drive down to the South Bay and back? It is a fucking bus that moves from point A to point B. There will be people who will hate you for anything you do. Always.
Disambiguify it and say "we're not trying to be a bunch of nightclub bouncers... we just have a large car pool"
I think there are people who would complain about a car pool too. Really, they just want the tech people to stay out, and anything that enables them to move in (like carpools or buses) is going to get complaints. The buses are a visible symbol, but not the root cause.
These children are paid above median income, espouse libertarian ideals, refuse to participate or share, and require their own shuttle service separate from 'the natives'.
It says something that to draw 'talent', you have to implement a separate transportation system to appease their fragile sensibilities.
If Caltrain or BART made the same trip and was even a tiny bit faster or more reliable most would switch in a heartbeat.
The problem isn't Google buses. It's that these tech companies don't pay any fucking taxes. The right way to solve this problem is to make them pay their damn taxes like normal people, and to use that money to build housing until it becomes affordable again (and then everyone can leave the buses alone). And if a corporation is bussing people in from San Francisco, it should pay SF taxes as well instead of being a fucking tax-evading suburbanite.
What's funny is that the skewed gender ratio in the south bay is probably what propelled a lot of male techies into the city in the first place.
As a young guy living in the Bay Area, I'm beginning to think I'll have to move to the east coast at some point just to find a wife.
Those buses are private, and paid for by Google, they're not public buses. Should I let anyone from SF ride in my personal car, just so they don't feel left out? Private means private, Google&co are allowed to let in (or keep out) anyone they want on buses they pay for.
Of course, there are larger social trends happening here that complicate the picture, such as a shift in the distribution of poverty between urban and suburban areas:
http://www.brookings.edu/research/books/2013/confrontingsubu...
There are people who say that it's okay because these technologies of convenience will eventually become affordable for everyone, essentially a trickle-down theory of technological progress. Maybe that's true.
I just want to avoid an Elysium-like scenario of futuristic enclaves surrounded by poverty-stricken shantytowns. As long as we can avoid that, I'll be much happier about building the future.
Jokes on you. Like most dystopian works, Elysium was about the present day. Those enclaves are already in almost every country.
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/what-the-hell-are-we-doing-he...
I wouldn't mind having the job title of “thinking about what the hell we are doing here.” Perhaps Hired is holding an auction for this very position.
That sentence really confused me. Like, what does it even mean, to be participating in city life?
Even after 2001, people liked tech and Silicon Valley and wanted to see these ecosystems succeed. That was the respectable way to get rich: to move to the Valley and start a company. No more. Average people hate tech now.
The problem is that, as often happens, the wrong targets are being attacked. People are lumping the $140k/year programmers (who'll never be able to afford a house in San Francisco) in with the $250k product executives and useless scene kids working 11-to-3, much less the $2M/year lawyers who figure out how tech companies can never pay a dime in taxes, which means they're not seeing the source of the real problem.
People were upset about different things—instead of Google buses, lofts being converted into luxury condos and so on—but the emotions and the discourse were much the same. I remember a startup called Bigstep that got into hot water because they took over office space from a community org or something that couldn't afford the rent any more [2]. There was a lot of talk about the Latino community being displaced by dotcom types, about Marina yuppies taking over the nightlife—at places like Blowfish Sushi, plus a somehow slightly creepy experiment called Circadia [3] that Starbucks ran at Bryant and Mariposa, which was an emblem of dotcom excess. It's just an ordinary Starbucks now.
I haven't noticed any change in how "average" people feel about tech, except perhaps that its status has gone up.
One thing that actually has changed from the dotcom bubble to now is the massive shift of power away from VCs and MBAs towards founders and engineers. (Which is kind of ironic since it contradicts almost everything you say about the industry.) Investors have lost power relative to founders and managers have lost power relative to programmers. Both of those trends have been going on for a long time, but have been accelerating. They seem to me to be good trends, arguably even for the investors and managers.
Curiously, this shift is visible in the cultural ripples around the dotcoms then vs. the startups now. The dotcom bubble produced a lot of ersatz culture that matched its mostly ersatz startups. The parts of it that I saw were douchey and suity; a place like Circadia, which I mentioned above, was an expression of that. It was full of people who weren't actually working on anything. The decor was lavish, but the coffee and food (not that I could afford the food) were mediocre. Compare that to a place like Sightglass now, where the coffee is excellent and most people are working on stuff. Sure they're hipsters, but it's still a crowd I'd rather be around than the one that used to make me squirm back then; and I'm a dyed-in-the-wool programmer type who hasn't much changed.
[1] http://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Mission_Yuppie_Eradicatio.... Also http://www.uncanny.net/~wetzel/macchron.htm and http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2000/03/35154, and there's lots more where those came from.
[2] Googling this turned up http://blog.doubledutch.me/2012/03/the-rise-of-the-mission-s... which includes some details about anti-dotcom protests in from 1999-2000.
[3] https://www.salon.com/1999/01/21/feature_238/. I sometimes worked on my thesis there because they had internet. Most of their tech-oriented image was silly, though. The place was all pretense.
San Francisco's problem is that it is mismanaged. That's not just a message board opinion; it appears to be the consensus of all observers, including that of journalists who cover the city. The city's services are poorly run, its growth is haphazard and pointlessly retarded, and it's hamstrung by its geography. But it also seems to be more livable today that it was in 1999, when the market was crazy enough that I had to pay my year's rent in advance to secure an apartment.
Step 1: Cherry-pick most extreme comments possible and imply that they represent the average opinion.
Step 2: Make numerous anecdotal assertions without any effort to back them in statistics.
Step 3: Instigate mudslinging by displaying cherry-pickings to other side.
Step 4: Feedback into Step 1.
"Since we don't understand the macroeconomic system that is causing these issues, let's just blame a random group of people who are doing well in said system."
It's pretty obvious by now San Francisco is one of the worst places for a fast growing tech industry. They don't want change, it's a tiny peninsula (I've walked from one end to the other), there's not enough land, taxes are high, traffic is awful, transportation is apparently awful, they're overly bureaucratic, their politics are broken (all things I've heard directly from SF natives and expats), prices and living expenses are the highest in the USA, the community is volatile towards the businesses there (compare SF to St. Louis & other cities who are passing incentive packages worth $1+ Billion just to get Boeing to bring 8,000 jobs to their city). The city looks unique, hip and trendy, and just like Vogue has more issues than anyone can count.
They're complaining about gentrification as if it's the worst thing in the world. Meanwhile in St. Louis, we're all praying for gentrification. When neighborhoods become run down and violent no one says anything, everyone just moves away. When those same people move back to fix everything up suddenly they're the villain. In St. Louis, the poor just move to a cheaper place in a nicer house using the money they got from their fixer-upper home. That's something SF natives can't really do because of SF's land size problem. I've spoken to African Americans and minorities who took part in gentrification just above Martin Luther King street and bought homes to fix them up. The world operates in much more rational, logical ways outside of the hipster-bubble. If silicon valley moves, who will SF blame their problems on then?
Pretend that Silicon Valley never existed in the bay area. Would A-N-Y of San Francisco's major problems be solved? They'd still have busted transportation, still have high rent, the politics would still be the same, they'd still ignore Oakland residents, still have a lack of housing, still have the homeless problem, and everything else. This is just another re-occurring pattern in human nature: "Blame your problems on those who have nice things."