Didn't read due to ridiculous web design. I don't think I should have to click between every sentence, nor should I be subjected to a non-standard user interface.
The slide show worked well for the visual content (of which there was a lot), but there was also a lot of content that would be better suited to a regular article.
would work better with auto loading trigger content on scroll or something. anything is better than this though. i'd prefer a regular article with graphs actually.
Good content, but seriously who signed off on actually presenting this content the way it is presented? Seems like a high school multimedia class project.
My guess is that the author, who is a journalist, wanted to distance himself or herself from the content and not be associated with it; making it multimedia puts him or her among the technocrats while allowing them to write whatever they want. It also has the (actual) effect of being more engaging for decision makers. (So much so that it leads with a note saying it's only the author's opinion, not cnn's.)
probably many people here would not have read through a straight article with the same information. It's also more engaging and real - e.g. the video stories.
Edit: also the whole article is about the contrast with silicon valley. so having a new app-y interface to play with every second of the reading puts that contrast especially starkly. it certainly worked on me. (if I had read the same article in sfgate in the usual article format I dont think it would have had the same effect.)
Surely, we need more government regulations and programs not less. Removing zoning laws can't possibly be the solution. Maybe we can have the government give housing to poor families, thereby taking housing stock off the market and reducing supply.
What always surprises me is that in the US "liberal" means left leaning and pro government intervention. Which is basically the opposite of liberalism.
> What always surprises me is that in the US "liberal" means left leaning and pro government intervention. Which is basically the opposite of liberalism.
Politically speaking, "left leaning" and "liberal" are both terms of 18th century origin, referring to the same kind of opponents of the centralized monarchic/oligarchic authority in favor of distribution of power to the people at large based on a conception of inherent rights; they certainly aren't opposite terms.
And the modern US liberal/conservative divide is a lot more about the purpose of government intervention than for/against it. (Both liberals and conservatives attack each other over different policies for supporting government control over individual freedom.)
This is simple supply and demand. Everyone from liberal economist Paul Krugman [1] to SF board of supervisors member Scott Wiener [2] agrees that California and bay area housing policies are horrible. The only people who actually like these policies are the people who are benefiting from them, typically because they moved to a neighborhood decades ago and are either on rent control or "rent control for property tax" (aka Proposition 13).
The solution is simple. Set aside a square mile in each city on the peninsula and zone it such that it is illegal to build a building of less than 10 stories. At the same time, and more importantly, repeal both proposition 13 and rent control statutes.
For step 3, sit back and watch the California economy go into turbo drive as there is a massive construction boom, which funnels money away from rich landlords and into the pockets of ordinary construction workers and the service workers that support both them and the engineers the region's wealth is built on.
Considering how many folks have most of their net worth tied up in a $1.5M 1500 sq. ft. home in the city, there is going to be a TON of resistance to more building. Can you imagine the average price of a home dropping to $700K? Tens of thousands of folks would be underwater on their homes.
All of the value in their homes was created by government regulation. Complaining about the price of your home going down because government regulation is removed is like taxi medallion owners complaining about Uber. In both cases government unfairly created the wealth through regulating scarcity.
Absolutely agree. It baffles me why the tech companies in the area don't lobby aggressively for reduced zone regulations and restrict appeals to construction work. The whole bay area would profit massively from a more flexible workforce and less money being spent on rents (in addition to the construction boom).
In SF, building regulations includes very powerful neighborhood groups with the ability to make arbitrary changes to projects. The net result of their involvement tends to be less housing at higher cost.
There are also many areas zoned for a maximum height of zero feet.
As for how to be involved, start by looking up who your city councilperson is. Talking to them would be a good start.
It skips some important points. The cost of living is high due to zoning laws and a lack of building. Subsidizing families' rent will just make existing landlords richer. It would just drive rents up further. What is needed to get fewer people bidding on the same unit. If landlords are finding <1 suitable tenants per vacancy then suddenly it becomes a renter's market.
On top of more housing, we need better public transit. Start with running Caltrain every 10 minutes. Change local transit so that it becomes a feeder to/from Caltrain, BART, etc.
And make it cheaper.
I'm usually against taxes in general, but I'm actually for increasing taxes and using that to have a completely free mass transit system across the entire Bay Area. This would provide a tremendous benefit for everyone.
The problem is that unions will take advantage of all that money and increase wages and pension benefits for their workers instead of hiring more workers and increasing employment in general. This is what happens when there's an influx of money, it causes inflation.
Caltrain already runs all the way to Gilroy. You can't really extend it much. But you can run it more frequently; and that's where you run into union issues. It's not propaganda that public employee unions are quite resistant to change; just look at MUNI's Union (in SF) for example.
yes, public transportation is very important to spread the liveable area beyond commutable distances. That would mean more land to build on. A more expansive and well connected BART network would be very beneficial.
This may not be too popular, but subsidizing housing for the poor in Silicon Valley will drive up rents for the people in the middle who are not receiving the subsidy.
And besides, the subsidies would be crazyyy because of the existing prices. What would help those in need without affecting the prices is building/assigning/requiring certain percentage of new housing projects to include low-income housing (I've mentioned this elsewhere in the thread).
The problem with this is that the low-income housing portion will be artificially lower than market prices forcing the landlord to increase the rent on the other units to make up for it. Once again as the OP mentioned, the middle class gets squeezed out since supposedly market prices do not actually exist to be taken advantage of.
This is a great point. Rent control just shifts increasing costs to the newest arrivals. If you were lucky enough to arrive early, you get all the benefit (generally).
Public housing is an anethma in the English-speaking world these days, but it's one answer. Mixing public housing/apartments in with private would provide accomodation while also providing a base price.
I would imagine that silicon valley could draw some positive insights from the public housing scheme in other countries such as Singapore. 80% of the Singaporean population live in public housing.
No. The Valley is geographically constrained. The mountains enclosing it are too rugged to safely build on. The best you could do would be to permit high-rise housing which would provide some expensive housing to the high-end.
A better idea would be to stop permitting any non-housing construction until the housing to job balance is restored.
This is just empirically false. High rise construction is massively cheaper than the current property values. Per square foot, suburban Palo Alto is $1409 per square foot at the median [1]. Heck, even the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, and hardly a bastion of affordable housing, cost only 1.5B / 3,595,146 = $417 per square foot. [2]
More reasonable construction of 10 - 20 stories could easily be put up for that cost, even once you factor in the high cost of labor in CA.
Most of the value in the "per square foot suburban Palo Alto" number comes from the land, not the structure.
If all those single-family houses were torn down and rebuilt as high-density, then surely the price per square foot would be cheaper. Property rights are pesky though.
This is untrue. High-rise housing can be quite affordable, if built in sufficient density. Everything in the Bay Area is laughably low density compared to the east coast (let alone NYC or even Tokyo or Hong Kong)
Don't feel silly -- many Valley cities have strict rules on building height too. Ideally, we'd like high-rise living next to mass transit, but I outside of downtown San Jose, I doubt any city would approve.
This may not be the most popular thing to say, but ... Just move?
If you are the head of a large household living in an area where the cost of living is too high to support your dependents, you would do a whole lot of good for them and yourself by starting new in some other part of the country. At the very least it would be wise to relocate across the Bay.
I realize that people have families, social networks, and small-scale culture that they don't want to separate from. It's a sad reality, but sometimes the economic forces that re-balance labor markets require people to physically relocate. If your labor is not as valuable in a particular geographic region, it's time to retrain or move. For most people retraining is not an option...
My sentiment is not classist or elitist. The same argument applies to people of all socioeconomic backgrounds. I have personally relocated for financial reasons three times in my life. I moved away from home for college, I moved to a new location for my first job, then I recently relocated to the Bay Area because this was the optimal place for me to be economically. I did all this with very little money saved up and with no financial support outside my paycheck. It has been easier for me to keep in touch with my family than it would be for these people (I make enough to travel to visit family several times a year). However, I have made sacrifices and relocated for my personal financial well-being. If I had a family to look after, I would have (and arguably ought to have) sacrificed even more.
EDIT: That being said, I fully support relaxing regulation on the construction of new housing. It would be better if people didn't have to move, but I believe that even with optimal housing growth there would not be enough real estate to comfortably house the current lower-middle class population of SV.
It costs a lot to move, especially when you are unskilled and have no idea if you will be able to find employment wherever you end up. It is made worse when you are participating in any sort of social safety net because you don't know if you'll have that available when you get wherever the grass is greener. And that says nothing about social and familial networks.
I can see how one might feel 'just move' is a good argument, but really NO! In chinatowns all over the country, whenever low-income residents are being priced out, the argument is always 'you can just find another place to stay'. They've lived there for decades, if not more. That's where all the people they know are. They are poor but they do have a support system, that lives with them. When they move away, not only are they economically helpless, but also socially helpless.
To tell people to just 'move away' is very dense, IMHO. You might not feel the same way about places you live in, but some people feel VERY STRONGLY emotionally about where they live. Consider the fact that when there's natural disasters/flood/earthquake/radiation leaks, there's not insignificant percentage of people who would rather stay where they are and suffer the consequences rather than move away. Which is why evacuations often have to be FORCED! People would rather die than move away from their homes. You cannot just say 'they can just move away': the concerns are valid.
I can also understand that. Now these people, not making a lot of money. They at least had a social support system, happy with friends families etc. They had a place they could call their own, and the pride that comes with it. You've taken their support system out.
In short, it is cheaper to build them houses and put them there, than to put them in prisons. Whether people get happy in places they like, or they get pissed at the system and live in prison, it's your tax dollars either way.
> In short, it is cheaper to build them houses and put them there, than to put them in prisons. Whether people get happy in places they like, or they get pissed at the system and live in prison, it's your tax dollars either way.
This solution makes me really uncomfortable.
You're completely disregarding the individual and saying that we are responsible for creating an environment for them and ultimately, we are responsible for their behavior.
These are independent, adult people who are perfectly capable of making their own decisions, good or bad, and living with the consequences of those decisions.
It shouldn't be the public's responsibility to remove them from neighborhoods or 'build them houses and put them there' as you said.
If low income people want to live in one of the most expensive areas in the world, they can. But they shouldn't expect to live well.
You know, it's quite possible to treat adults as independent agents who are responsible for their own actions and yet acknowledge (and possibly even be sympathetic to) the fact that these same adults can be subject to external forces which put them in a really tough spot.
Of course. But what about the people who are in a tough spot because of internal forces? Surely you don't think the woman in the first video fell pregnant a second time because of external forces?
Yes, some people do have the story of "got laid off after 35 years, company stole my pension, now I'm homeless", or "had a long, expensive medical emergency, now am homeless". You can pinpoint the external force. But this piece showed one thing in particular that was striking: it seems it's rarely one major event that plunges someone into a bad situation like these (consider that none of these videos had one "this is what happened" sound bite). It seems like it's the snowball effect of bad decision after bad decision.
What do we do with people who are in really tough spots because of the compounding behavior of bad decisions? "We invest in the educational system so kids learn how to avoid these spots" -- ok, great, but what do we do with THESE people, today?
Accepting the "external forces" thing is a slippery slope, because now somebody is the arbiter of You Did It To Yourself vs. It's Not Your Fault. Who can we trust with that position? Is it even moral to make that judgement? Was this whole comment satire on being the arbiter of justice?
edit - it seems strange that many well paid technocrats will happily hold sway on the possibilities of sea-steading, or building fusion reactors, or anything involving a giant laser, or suchlike, but throw up their hands and declare the problem of houses for the poor people they or their workforce are displacing to be an insurmountable fact of the economy that can only be solved by the poor people moving to somewhere that hasn't yet become cool. And to be utterly cynical about the whole thing, if rich folk really want to build a city on a hill, they probably shouldn't price out all the trades if they want it to function in the long run.
If you convince enough to change the laws, then the nature of our system is that they will be convinced. The question is, can you convince enough. Perhaps I see many luxuries as not worth supporting, at least not until other problems are solved (and being government revenue is limited, sometimes being low priority means not being funded at all).
I think you mean 'people ho pay more tax'. People living in poor neighborhoods typically pay taxes as well - on some of their income, most of their consumption, and on their residences since their rent is inclusive of property tax.
I do not understand this insistence that money spent on building more housing here is bad whereas spending the same amount of money on having 'those people' move out of sight to somewhere else is somehow good.
I do not understand this insistence that money spent on building more housing here is bad whereas spending the same amount of money on having 'those people' move out of sight to somewhere else is somehow good.
Where does this housing get built? Why would you build it on some of the most expensive land (SV) in the lower 48?
I think the gap in your understanding is because you're just not listening to everyone telling you that the government's limited money will go further if it doesn't have to render/compensate landowners in the most expensive real estate market in the country.
It's ludicrous to suggest that the government spend money buying land to build co-op housing in SV.
The problem in SV and much of SF is the unwillingess of property owners to tolerate too much upward building and their use of the private right of action granted by the California Environmental Quality Act to stymie development at the planning permission stage. Incumbent landowners try to maintain the value of their investment by limiting any increases in density. We might, for example, do better to abandon zoning and instead set up mechanisms to auction development rights, eg http://marketurbanism.com/2012/01/06/the-coase-theorem-in-la...
Living in an area can be more than an emotional decision - for example, nearby family members might provide free childcare. Moving elsewhere would cause childcare to be a (large) financial burden.
A family on the edge doesn't always have the luxury to move.
Not to mention that a family's informal support network often works as a subsidy/social safety net, and when you move that definitely will not follow you. Probably the most common example is that many families in the US use family members to care for small children, because child care can easily cost ~30% of a family's income. Asking families to move to a lower COL area may well mean they have to pay more.
I'm a 40+ Programmer making good money with a family of five. A year ago I thought long and hard about moving away. In the end, I decided to stay because we have family here. Here's my unsolicited advice: if you are less than 30 and don't plan on being a dual-income family, move away no matter how much income you have. It makes no financial sense to live in the Bay Area: your net worth will be entirely tied to your property which is risky compared to living somewhere else and having diverse investments and savings.
The advice makes sense for the rich as well as the poor.
Financial sense depends on how you price the benefits of living in this area vs other areas. For example, being near family is a a benefit...so is being near people who care about technology, if that matters to you. Consider being a programmer in several startups over 5 years vs being a programmer in a large bank.
There are many houses on the market that fail or pass "rent vs buy" calculators - savings can go into diverse sources instead of a property if you so choose.
I'm of the opinion that the overall package is "worth it" here, but each person should consider their own evaluation metrics - and yes, move if you don't think it's worth it.
Note: this is certainly off-topic from the troubles of extremely poor people in this area.
> It makes no financial sense to live in the Bay Area
Until your first layoff. Then it's an absolute blessing to live somewhere where your next job is one more exit up 101.
This is the thing that everybody who works in tech forgets. If you live in Pittsburgh, Tulsa, or Lubbock, you are in for a many month job search--or you are leaving the city--when (not if) you get laid off.
Seagate had this problem a couple years ago. They wanted VLSI layout people in Pittsburgh and were offering comparable to Silicon Valley money--and nobody from the tech cities would bite. Why? Everybody knew that they were going to be the most highly paid people in the office and subject to getting axed first. And would then have to move back to Silicon Valley.
But is there anywhere else where I could feasibly save ~$60k each year? I honestly don't know since I only just moved to the US but at the moment my plan is to work here for a few years, save a nice pile of money and then move somewhere affordable and less urban to raise a family.
I'm hoping to be able to save ~$240k and buy a modest house on the outskirts of Portland or Tacoma and have a little left over.
I'm just wondering if there's anywhere else where I could save money like this?
The way you frame the argument is ignoring all the social, economic, and political problems that come with attempts to solve the issue. Rent control, for instance, has some serious issues that arguably negate the benefits that come from it.
I hate rent control, but I think it's a symptom of incumbents' unwillingness to allow more development, on the grounds that it would lower the value of the property they own (or more realistically, slow that value's rate of increase). A fixed-rate mortgage is basically rent control for better-off people; typically the mortgage-holder pays off a small bit of principal each month and pays rent on the outstanding amount.
So if we want to outlaw rent control, we should outlaw fixed rate mortgages too, and eliminate the artificial cap on property taxes (something that corporations exploit by using shell companies to 'own' commercial real estate, and then transferring ownership or voting control of the shell company while shielding themselves from property tax on the current value of the real estate). But we both know that that's not likely to happen.
> I hate rent control, but I think it's a symptom of incumbents' unwillingness to allow more development,
No. It began in SF as a very-specific response to Prop 13, which is essentially property-tax-control
Both are bad policies in terms of market distortion and are often the overlooked elephants in the room in discussion of housing supply and affordability.
What? Rent control did not originate in San Francisco, and has been around a lot longer than Proposition 13. Its history in modern economics goes back to world War 1, and the concept of economic rents and the need to regulate them originates with Adam Smith in the 18th century.
> You just think poor people should have to move out of their homes because rich people decided they want to live there.
That isn't how this works, at all. When the number of people who want to live in an area > the area's capacity, prices increase. See: every metro area in the world.
> Yeah, rich people get forced out of their homes because they can't afford them all the time. /s
Rich people move to optimize their finances all the time.
If rich people living around you only affected house prices then you'd be right, but they tend to push the cost of everything up. That's what drives poor people out.
This line of thinking is confusing cause and effect though. Silicon Valley started here because it was cheap. The whole area was agriculture and houses. Then computers took over the world and the success of the business here computerfied the valley. It made people who were already here wealthy.
It's like people think this situation is new, and poor people are the "real" natives of SV. If those damn facebooks and googles had left the valley alone everything would be great!
> Yeah, rich people get forced out of their homes because they can't afford them all the time. /s
Actually, in some places (certain NYC or London neighborhoods), the rich are getting pushed out by the ultrarich. What chance does a mere millionaire have against billionaires?
You just think poor people should have to move out of their homes because rich people decided they want to live there. Got it.
I'm not poor by any means, but if SF rents keep going up, I'm going to be leaving if I can't find affordable housing (even on a relatively high salary).
For rents to go up, people have to be able to pay those higher rents. Ostensibly because they have salaries that are even relatively higher than yours (this is not intended to be a slight, but when there is a bidding war for salaries there will be a bidding war for limited housing).
The cost of renting or buying property isn't limited to the income you get from your salary. I know of renters in expensive cities that have split one bedroom or studio apartments between multiple people. You can bet that whoever rented the woman in the article their garage to live in is using that money to help pay the mortgage.
No that's a great point. If enough folks making very high salaries move to SF (and the housing stock stays constant), then prices will rise.
My point is that it might not be fair that low-income folks have to move when housing gets more expensive, but it doesn't stop with low-income. I'm sure plenty of middle-income folks have been forced out of the Bay area as well.
If you're hand-to-mouth poor, you cannot afford a rental truck, let alone time off work and still feed your children. You will probably lose your job if you move, and not find another one where you land, especially if you're in the service industry. Good luck with that East bay -> peninsula commute on your minimum wage. The reason many cannot get jobs other places is due to felonies or other legal issues related to being poor.
If your children are in school a lot of parents would actually rather struggle than put their family through the trauma of a move, even if in the end it may be better.
American society is more mobile than others, but poverty (outside of vagrancy) is extremely restricting.
I do think your main thesis is correct (this is unmaintainable, gtfo), but moving is a multi-year struggle of planning and saving at these low levels of income.
This is at it's core class struggle, not individual unawareness.
Assuming government resources are needed to be spent to help resolve this, would they not be put to better use helping individuals relocate to somewhere sustainable (especially those who would be making a living wage elsewhere) than to subsidize the difference year after year?
No, it doesn't. It just assumes that people can't magically take their income with them when they leave. Even if the 10th percentile income is the same as in the Bay Area in some place where the average income and cost of living is lower than the Bay Area, that doesn't mean that someone in the 10th percentile in the Bay Area can move to that location and keep their income (or any income at all.)
I wonder if anyone's asked those poor people what they want.
I've seen a few commenters here suggesting using government money to ship 'em out, or retrain or job-place them, but I wonder: what do the poor in Silicon Valley want for their lives? Do they want to be shipped out? To be retrained? Better wages? Cheaper housing?
These are people, after all, and are worthy of being involved in any discussion concerning their fate.
I'm in no way limiting their choices. I am merely discussing the limits that should be put to best utilize limited government resources. If they do not like those limits, they do not have to accept the aid.
Your base point is a question? I assume you meant that your base point is something we should do with the answer to that question. Could you please restate your base point so I do not have to guess what that something is?
>You've said, ship 'em out! Retrain them! If they don't want to do those things, do nothing.
It seems you have misunderstood my point. I'm not saying to load them up and ship them out. I'm saying that if they want help, the best utilization of limited resources will be in helping them move somewhere more affordable. But they don't have to accept help; it isn't being forced on them.
It's equivocation really, because what they want, at the most general level, is not to be homeless. But they're the worst people to ask input from, because if they knew how not to be homeless, they wouldn't be homeless.
So sure, have a conversation and find out where they want to be in their life, but it's madness to think they'll give you insight into how to fix what got them there.
>Assuming government resources are needed to be spent to help resolve this
Many of the other fixes talk about changing laws, and my suggestion was basically in the scenario that those don't work. (I do grant that a law change would cost the government some money to implement, new permits, ect.; I just consider such costs when broken down per person help to be effectively zero and to, in large part, already be paid for by all the already hired staff.)
So I guess the question to you is... what about all the poor people in every other state. Have you asked them what they want to be done, so we can fairly allocate money? We could give those in need in SV ($TheirPoor * $BudgeToHelpThePoor)/$TotalPoor and let them spend it on what they want and if they run out, tell them tough luck.
On a side note, what happens to the average individual who wins big in the lottery?
A subsidised construction boom tied to population growth, for instance, would tend to help those on median to low incomes twice over. Once by keeping a lid on the cost of housing and secondly by providing a greater availability of reasonably well paid employment. It also helps those on higher incomes (as long as they are not those whose income is merely dependent on continually soaring house prices), both directly in lower rental costs and indirectly by reducing the cost of local services.
The problem is that the "poor" people are asking the wrong question. They are asking, "why can't I afford to live where I grew up?" The question they should be asking is, "should I live where I grew up?"
Exactly! A lot of people feel that they are entitled to live in the city they grew up in. They feel that the rising cost of living is unjust, and that they are the victims.
What needs to be understood is that we cannot force the cost of living to drop, and we cannot force the median income to rise.
Either search for a job that pays more, or search for a home that costs less. If that means moving away from where you grew up, then sorry, but that's literally your best option.
Is it fair? No - but life isn't fair. If you find yourself living in a place that you cannot afford, then you are the problem, not the world around you. Fix your own life, because nobody is going to do it for you.
Rent control doesn't force the cost of living to drop: it just shifts it.
The ROI on apartments drops substantially, so investors aren't incentivized to make new buildings, but instead maintain their current ones as cheaply as possible until they're unserviceable.
Not necessarily. A poorly maintained, older building may have worse heat insulation or vapour barriers, or problems with mold, or simply less efficient fixtures than modern buildings. Energy and healthcare bills can be substantial, and are borne by the tenants, not the landlords.
What you're really describing is a lower standard of living, not merely a lower cost of living.
I guess I can't think of a single instance in history where the world was made a better place with the attitude of "life isn't fair, you're on your own".
> Is it fair? No - but life isn't fair. If you find yourself living in a place that you cannot afford, then you are the problem, not the world around you. Fix your own life, because nobody is going to do it for you.
Come on. It's not as though the circumstances that created "Silicon Valley" were natural and beyond the control of anyone; why should we turn around and pretend the side effects were (well, other than it being convenient)?
When times are tough, moving does not need to be expensive. Before I moved to SV, I sold or donated everything I couldn't fit in two suitcases. I moved into an affordable house where I share a bedroom with 3 other people. I would be able to make rent with only $20k/year.
I know not everybody can divorce themselves from all of their belongings, especially large families. Additionally, I didn't have to worry about schools (no children) or work (my industry has ~0 unemployment). I did, however, have to worry about saving enough to survive between jobs and finding an affordable place to stay.
> This is at it's core class struggle, not individual unawareness.
I agree, but I think part of the solution has to involve helping people relocate. We should also strive to encourage a more distributed social life. If we had inexpensive, high quality video telecommunications I believe that people would be more okay with moving away from their families.
Selling all your belongings to move to SV when you're single, educated, and high employment chances is not as similar as you feel. I know you probably struggled to make it happen, and I'm not trying to understate that.. but that sounds completely different than poverty.
I have moved on a shoestring many times as well, but it's exponentially more complex when you have a family than when you're a single guy on the make. It's even more disruptive for children who are pulled out of their real-life social/educational network with basically no choice and no agency in how they go about reconstructing that.
We should also strive to encourage a more distributed social life.
Why? I'm not the most gregarious person and I am OK with telephones and video, but it's a far cry from meeting people you care about in person. The problem with helping people relocate rather than deal with these issues at their source is that you wind up with economic cleansing, large enclaves and entire cities where only the wealthy can live and others where only the poor can afford to reside. Naturally there are few economic opportunities in communities of poor people, so people who live in them have to travel ever farther to get to their jobs, with increased cost in fuel/transit fares and diminishing marginal utility of labor due to the extra commute time.
The thing is, the same dynamic is at work to varying degrees all over the country so it's far from obvious where people who are economically dislocated should move to.
You can divorce yourself from your belongings because it's easy for you to find work and quickly replace your belongings. If you know you'll have to sleep on concrete for the next 5 months because you won't be able to find work, you'll carry your mattress with you.
I think it is important to make the point that you cannot buy the items for the value you sale them at. For one, you are selling them quickly, which means selling them at a loss. Then add in that you are selling the items used, 'other-used' is valued at far less than 'self-used', which means even if you buy used once you moved, the items have lost value. For example, I'd much prefer my own bed that I slept in for 3 years than a strangers bed they only used for 2.
The struggles of the poor ("poor" as defined by the original post) are not the same as the struggles of a fresh college grad.
Households on minimum wage are often paycheck to paycheck, and thus have no buffer with which to even find a roof in a new city, much less hunt for a job in a less-reliable industry.
Also, familial connections are not just purely for joy - they may provide some amount of free childcare that would become a financial burden after moving away.
I moved to Seattle for Tech work. It required 2 months of planning and less than $5k in expenses (for two people). I moved from Memphis, TN.
Places like the Puget Sound and the Bay Area are going to keep getting populated with tech workers, and they are going to keep rising in cost.
Moving isn't hard. It sucks to feel kicked out of the city you live in, but there isn't much that can be done. If you can't afford it, move somewhere that you can.
I hate gentrification, but what can we do to avoid it? Ban high-paying jobs? Maybe one day all of this will bite us in the ass, but if you find yourself on the receiving end right now, do the best thing you can for yourself and get out!
I was sitting here trying to figure out how to say basically the same thing. Growing up my dad had a good job but we never were able to afford to live in $NEAREST_METRO_AREA, so we always lived a commute away -- sometimes a long commute away.
Charity idea: provide moving & job placement help to get homeless or nearly homeless families into lower cost of living areas.
I always have mixed feelings about stories like this. Like the woman from the first video: homeless, just got a garage for her and her 18-month-old. Pregnant again. Kids do not make your financial situation better or life less stressful.
The kids didn't ask for poverty and it's not their fault -- all true. But what do we do, enforce reproduction strategy at gunpoint?
Being a parent I have tons of empathy for how hard life is for single parents.
That said, I really lost a lot of sympathy for the woman in the garage though, kids are hugely expensive (about a quarter million dollars to raise them to 18) and I just can't understand how she thought having a second kid would improve her situation. Obviously it could have been an accident or similar, but damn, maybe now isn't the right time for a second kid!
I'm probably just a first world asshole with no sense of what it must be like in her position.
The striking thing to me is that it seems it's rarely one major event that plunges someone into a bad situation like these (consider that none of these videos had one "this is what happened" sound bite). It seems like it's the snowball effect of bad decision after bad decision.
Living in a garage while trying to look after an infant is likely to be a big drain on cognitive resources. It's easy for you and me to sit here and say what a bad idea this is - obviously we all enjoy enough economic freedom to sit here chit-chatting about economic policy for a few minutes in the middle of the daytime. When you don't have existential anxieties crowding in on you, such things seem so simple and obvious.
It would be a very different calculus if any of us were in that woman's situation. Maybe she made a bad decision. Maybe someone told her she'd be much more likely to get public assistance with two children than one, and she's ashamed to admit it. Maybe she was coerced into sex in exchange for money or because her personal safety was threatened. I very much doubt that she just decided it was a Friday, and a good time to get her sexy on.
You mean well, but its easy to forget that moving a family a long distance costs a nontrivial amount of money, even if you do it on the cheap. Maybe not a problem for you or me, but much more so for a family already barely scraping by.
Nontrivial, but how does it compare to the 100K a year the article mentioned needed to life them out of poverty? 5K to move and then 20K a year to lift them out of poverty in a different area would allow us to help far more families.
I've moved plenty in my life, both as a child and as an adult. The most common reason people don't move is because they are afraid to leave the social circles. And what a lot of people don't realize is that their their social circles may not actually be that strong anymore now that they have become adults and had children... which then it just comes down to them being afraid or "just don't want to".
Of course there are an infinite number of other factors involved, especially when money is thrown into it, but this has been my experience when talking with people.
"I believe that even with optimal housing growth there would not be enough real estate to comfortably house the current lower-middle class population of SV"
The word optimal is doing a hell of a lot of heavy lifting here.
"This may not be the most popular thing to say, but ... Just move?"
The other question is (don't know the answer) how many people who owned homes (instead of renting) were able to cash in in some way on rising property values?
My guess is that at least some of the people renting made the decision to not purchase and some of the people owning made the decision to not rent. Of the people who could choose an option.
As far as people saying "it costs money to move" what about one family member moving and the other staying until a life is established elsewhere? [1]
Maybe what is needed instead of handouts is some kind of social service that makes people aware of their options. Edit: And pushes them to take those options even if they are painful. And also to make them realize that "even though you don't want to move because your friends and family are here" you might have to move if you can't afford this place anymore.
Note: I don't live in California and have no skin in this game.
[1] And lastly, has the "problem" even been properly quantified? I watch stories similar to this on TV news reports. They always pick the right people that you seem to be able to relate to and a situation that always seems unjust. But they never show exactly how many people actually are like that person (or even not like that person). They pull at your emotional heartstrings because their job is to make the story attractive, not necessarily balanced. And when they do they always add the "to be sure" that gets them off the hook. As in "to be sure not everyone who is homeless is XYZ" etc.
One of the most shocking things I saw in the Philippines was exactly this. A mother living and working in a city as a nanny/maid, while her husband and children lived "back home" fairly far away. She saw them only a couple of times per year. That's some sacrifice she's making to put food on her family's table!
You also find that happens on certain cruise lines. A family works on a ship and send the money back home.
I am guessing that some people think that there is so much money sloshing around the Valley that taxes should be higher to take care of those in need. The potential problem there is that you simply encourage more people to stay or actually even more people to move to the area to take advantage of that benefit.
That's probably why all the solutions mentioned by the article were nationwide and not local. If you improve quality of life everywhere, then you can avoid that problem.
A big problem with this concept is jobs. The working poor are almost exclusively employed in the service sector at or near minimum wage. Worse yet, many are essentially day laborers, even outside of the sort of fields normally associated with on-demand labor (to wit: startups like workpop.com and shiftgig.com are responding to market realities).
Finding a food service or house cleaning or landscaping job in a depressed, but affordable, city like Redding or its ilk is going to be way, way harder than in a more expensive place.
Add to this that once you lose your car, you can't live or work outside of a city with functional public transportation. None of those are cities are going to be dirt cheap.
Agree - and in addition, they may not have a 2-week buffer to find a new job even if it were available. They certainly aren't being flown in for interviews.
The fact you fail to recognise it as elitist doesn't mean it isn't. You are elitist because you fail to understand that life can be a great deal harder for other people. "I did it so they can too" assumes that other people don't live in circumstances that prevent them doing things. That is plain wrong.
If I had a family to look after, I would have (and arguably ought to have) sacrificed even more.
One of the things you might have had to sacrifice is having enough money to relocate.
I admit to not understanding the mindset. So I honestly want to understand it.
One family in the article has two parents both with full time jobs. And they're living in a homeless shelter. I understand that they can't afford $3,000 per month rent in the city. But how is it that they don't have enough money to relocate? Even a few miles away to something more affordable?
If the father works in construction, that's skill that is in high demand and easily transferable. You can walk into a construction office tomorrow and be swinging a hammer by Monday right?
There must be more going on. Some important piece of the puzzle is being withheld from their story.
Getting the poor out of the city won't be easy. They don't have enough capital to fund a relocation on their own. The government will probably need to ship them out on rail cars. Once the undesirables vacate their homes, those structures can be replaced with housing more fitting for the well-off residents of the city.
The value of your labor relative to housing is dropping every year too you know.
The notion of re-balancing forces is a nice simple story but the price of housing relative to income has risen nationwide for decades. There is a similar story for medical care and even food.
So yes it's fun to believe in the invisible hand and Adam Smith's 200 year old thesis. But the reality is that the value of all labor is simply being driven downward.
For that matter, Adam Smith was a great deal more aware of structural factors and the lack of sustainability that would result from unrestrained pursuit of wealth -it's salutary that he titled his most famous work 'The Wealth of Nations' rather than 'The Wealth of Corporations.'
Smith was keenly aware of the dangers of mercantilism and WoN is anything but an argument for unrestrained capitalism. Indeed, the second most observation in the book, after the one about the fact that butchers and bakers are motivated by self-interest rather than generosity, is that “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
Disregarding the question of the cost/possibility of moving, do we as a society want communities to be completely segregated based on income? Do we want poor kids to grow up without role models and good education opportunities? Do we want rich kids to grow up believing they somehow deserve all this, completely detached from the rest of society and the problems they face?
The forces of the market are not the forces of nature, and we make the rules (or, at least, shape them greatly).
It actually has an older, more common, name: policy. Doing something and not doing something are both kinds of policy, and are both choices we make. Pretending that the market forces are somehow neutral or natural is factually false. They are nothing more than the product of a certain chosen policy.
> I have personally relocated for financial reasons three times in my life. I moved away from home for college, I moved to a new location for my first job, then I recently relocated to the Bay Area because this was the optimal place for me to be economically.
> I make enough to travel to visit family several times a year
are you serious, dude? leave the advice giving for people who have actually been poor and understand the logistic difficulties of poverty. "just move"? you have the freedom to move to the most economically optimal place for you, and you think THAT is equivalent to the situation of a family living hand to mouth in transitional housing or section 8?
"Just Move?" I'd rather live out of my car (and have done so..briefly.)
Together with my cofounders over two years we have built an amazing company and product (and we still have a ways to go). This would not be possible outside of Silicon Valley, and our trajectory would look much different (worse) if we lived in, say, Montana.
This is a multi-faceted issue that has no easy fix. In the SF bay region the issue is exacerbated by convoluted politics perpetrated by residents and government. Locals steadfastedly oppose growth, even when most might agree it's for everyone's good.
On the other hand, some sub areas are bound geographically and can't expand horizontally, so the only way is upwards, which faces even more resistance.
On top of this, no one has a natural right to live in a specific area. At the same time society has a responsibility to provide reasonably affordable living space for lower income residents. However, it doesn't necessarily mean it has to be in the posh areas of town.
Still as land prices increase, is it even possible to build in areas of high land prices? Where does that money come from? Do we divert taxes to that effort rather than building that same housing in areas where that money would go further?
With regard to people not being able to move away due to cost, there are lots of people who move to the US with nothing but a few dollars and an address. It's possible. I guess the question is do we want to put our own citizens in this kind of predicament?
Our society can't operate without an integrated workforce and you can't have an integrated workforce if you segregate people based on their income.
For every software engineer in the Bay Area there is an army of waiters, cooks, janitors, sanitation workers, retail workers, office workers, school teachers, nurses, and unskilled laborers that supports him. And if you move them all out, well, I don't think that I have to explain the consequences of that action.
The Bay Area engineer is likely there to work for a company that obsoletes one or two of those unskilled laborers. I think the really scary part will be 10 years from now when everything's automated
People build up support structures - extended family, close friends, church and hobby/interest ares. The cost of moving once you have a family is a often a whole lot higher than easily quantifiable dollar values.
So if you look at the numbers actually tons of people are moving out of California. On the other hand tons of people are moving in too. However, I think the overall effect is Cailifornia is losing people every month.
I don't agree with it, but the Bloomberg administration in NYC tried a program where they bought one-way plane tickets for homeless families[1] to leave the overcrowded shelter system. Critics were against it because it wasn't addressing any of the root causes of the problem, rather just moving/hiding it in a similar way to the bulldozing of "the Jungle"
I am struggling to find the name of the program in the article in order to see if it has "worked" in any way to reduce homelessness. Not sure if it is even still around.
EDIT: It's called Project Reconnect[2] and it is still around even though De Blasio apparently was against it[3]
> This may not be the most popular thing to say, but ... Just move?
Exactly. Millions of immigrants uproot themselves and move every year. Yeah, it sucks for the first few years, but then it becomes better. America had its share of mass migrations in the middle part of last century; but for some reason people don't want to move as much these days.
The question I have in all this: can someone name an entry level job in a high tech company that covers the full cost of attending Stanford or even Cal. I went to Santa Clara and graduated 2008. People were excited about getting 70k/year starting out as finance majors.
If you plug this salary into a loan calculator and assume ($50k/year for tution and living expenses) that's 200k in debt at graduation.
No one in the Silicon Valley makes enough to cover that.
The assumption then is that people will have parents who help them out through college. Ergo, there is no real social mobility because you need a certain type of parent to ensure you don't have student debt that leaves you in the red even with a high tech job.
The valley and SF just rich kids getting richer while screwing over everyone else.
I don't think the solution is as simple as 'building more housing'(aka giving permits). It would drive down the prices somewhat, but what's to stop more engineers from moving in/shortening their own commutes etc? I think the term we're looking for is 'build low-income housing'. That would make it more likely that people who need it get it.
Right. Now imagine you live in one of those cities. You're living comfortable as an engineer, etcetera. You have a community going on. Your city has its budget, its school system and so on. The city wants to allow permits to build as many houses as it can to drive the low enough to make them affordable for the homeless. Bear in mind you live in a very attractive part of the country, so homeless will be driven out of the market very quickly. That's a LOT of units. There are only limited public resources, and they can expand only so fast. If you care even a bit about community around the place you live, you know having tens/hundreds of thousands of people (who are likely not going to be long-time residents) moving straight in couple of years is not a good idea. You're going to vote against the city granting those permits. One would rather the city build low-income housing then let the swamped by new transplants.
Why would you build low income housing that excludes people in the middle? All low income housing does is creates two tiers of housing prices and if you are at the low end of the income scale and do not qualify for the low income housing, you are even more screwed than you otherwise would be. The solution is to build more housing that lowers everyone's rent.
Because engineers aren't moving here for the amazing housing. They're moving here for the jobs. If you're increasing housing, that doesn't affect the jobs available. It would decrease demand on housing without increasing demand by engineers.
Most of the engineers I work with live very far out, to find affordable housing/good school districts. If denser housing allowed them to afford to live closer to their job, they would.
I agree with increasing building density, but there is a large group already employed in SV/SF that will move into that housing from a 4hr radius around the area. Still would be interested to see a projection that would model this possibility.
Good modeling of the possible outcomes is the first step on the rocky road to getting Bay Area zoning changed. Not holding my breath.
Maybe I'm missing the point here, but why is it reasonable to think that a single mother with a low income should be able to afford to live in San Mateo?
Because reality for the lower class is far more complicated than that. In theory, she should move elsewhere. In practice, its not nearly that easy - there's no certainty of a new job, no money to move, (well-placed) fear of losing what little safety net they have, etc.
That's awful for her and others in her situation, but I don't think it supports an argument that anyone should be able to afford to live in any region regardless of their income. And really, that's the only solution to problems like hers: building subsidized low-income housing in very expensive areas.
San Mateo is expensive. Very expensive. Outside of direct market distortions like subsidized low income housing, it will always be too expensive for many people to live there. As many challenges as she faces in moving, she'll face more trying to raise a child in a garage.
Building subsidized housing is only one way to subsidize housing expenses. There are vouchers, sliding scale housing, mixed income housing, set-asides, and more.
Its very possible the father of the child lives in SM, and she is obligated to live in a certain area. Lawyers cost money even if one person is not paying child support. W/o a good lawyer, people can lose things, like kids.
Also, if she had a technical career, her best way to find income again is to stay in the area -- shorter commute, more opportunities, higher income.
Speaking as a once single mom with an extensive technical resume, finding a job can be next to impossible. Regardless, living in the city increases the chance.
Is there any way to read the article in a Web 1.0 manner, with paragraphs and inline media? I like that CNN is trying to present content in a new manner but that felt like I was reading the slides of a conference presentation. At some point I even turned on the sound to make sure I wasn't missing the embedded speaker's audio.
That woman was talking about how she had been homeless after her child was born, and how that status had affected her perceptions of security since. She seemed to have a mostly self-deprecating, while also grateful, air about the garage.
I think they placed her there in the beginning so that your average white middle-class CNN viewer could relate a bit more to the stories of the homeless to come.
As someone from outside the US, how much do you need to earn in order to live well in this area? There was one slide stating a minimum of $100K for a family of four just to "escape poverty". Is that really the case?
And if so, how do early stage founders who aren't already rich manage to get by?
Is that true for tech start ups in the bay area? I'd be interested to know if the investors have different founder salary expectations for older founders.
$100k as a minimum to raise a family and have a reasonable (read: tolerable -- not luxurious) lifestyle in Silicon Valley is very accurate. If anything, it's low.
On $100k, you wouldn't really be able to save very much, so the idea that you could somehow "escape poverty" while raising a family in Silicon Valley on that salary is somewhat of a stretch.
In Silicon Valley, a "middle class" family typically means two highly educated adults each earning six figure incomes.
Depends on what you mean by "living well". On the Peninsula in a good neighborhood with a 2k+ sqft house and 2 kids in private school, yearly vacations, newish cars? $400k household income minimum imo.
It's really a meaningless numbers game - no matter where you live, you have to trim your lifestyle to what your income supports.
$3000/mo for rent is pretty basic but safe housing for a family of 4 in most of the area; there are broad areas of the bay area map that you won't be able to find it that cheap at all. On the other hand it's possible to go lower by driving a bit more or compromising a bit.
Part of the trouble is that income taxes are not based on local economies, so they'd be taxed as if they were quite well off even though they're struggling.
A startup founder is not likely to have dependents so can divide by 4, and then not worry about things like how good the school district is. Although they may not be "rich" in the conventional sense, they likely have an education and connections that the guys who are stocking the grocery shelves can only dream of, and parents or someone else they can always fall back on if worst comes to worst.
anecdotally the founders I know were young, single and were roommates due to financial constraints. It wasnt until after funding was established that they could afford to live on their own. The cost per bedroom drops in 2-4 bedroom places compared to studio/1bd, naturally.
Correct. There is a religious libertarian belief that somehow changing zoning laws will "fix" the problem. No numbers are ever given (maybe prices would stay level for a few years) And no one notices that the extremely dense housing of Manhattan did not make Manhattan cheap.
If they want to fix the problem they'd need large tracts of very high grade housing rented non-profit, (never sold) on government land. The competition from this would drive prices through the floor.
The price will increase no mater what you do so long as you rely on an uncontrolled free market in real-estate.
At some point prices will make employing people there impracticable due to wages and commercial rental. In the current system, that is the price point the market will reach no mater how many units are built.
Fix the public education system so that living in a poorer area doesn't mean your kids have zero chance at real success. We are moving more and more towards a caste-system where your parents success is the most important factor in your own success, as a child. It hurts us all when we don't have the most qualified people possible performing the important professions.
The largest predictor of educational success, like you said, is money. You can try to equalize, but the rich will always find ways to spend more money on their children's education.
I don't think there is a solution as long as America's rising inequality continues.
The "evidence" provided was pretty weak, IMO. I think the last option, a basic living allowance, is something we, as a country, are going to have to come to terms with. As manufacturing continues to automate, even the low skill jobs we offshore are at risk. It is unlikely everybody in the nation will be able to find employment as a knowledge worker or a service worker. That is the direction the world is heading, whether we want it to or not, and, even if they can all find employment, it's questionable what percentage of service workers can make sufficient to provide for their needs.
I prefer a minimum living stipend for a few reasons: It doesn't treat the poor like they are too stupid or too criminal to manage their own lives and their own money. It allows people the ability to move to more fulfilling (and more lucrative) employment by providing time for training. It protects kids without trying to transition parenting responsibility to the state. In general, it keeps the state out of people's lives, increasing their dignity.
Yes, there will still be homeless people. There will be people who squander the money. But there will be many who take advantage of it and build a better life for themselves and all of their posterity. And I prefer to bet on the general desire of people to better themselves.
The problem is I don't know how to get there from here.
"The "evidence" provided was pretty weak, IMO. I think the last option, a basic living allowance, is something we, as a country, are going to have to come to terms with"
The issue with this is that once you start giving a basic living allowance, more and more people will continue to rely on it over time and the system will eventually collapse.
"I prefer a minimum living stipend for a few reasons: It doesn't treat the poor like they are too stupid or too criminal to manage their own lives and their own money."
It's not their money, it's money given to them by the tax payers..and I don't agree with you reasoning. If you are getting free money from the government, it means you can't manage your own life. I don't really see how this will change the view on the disadvantaged.
"It allows people the ability to move to more fulfilling (and more lucrative) employment by providing time for training."
I don't think this would increase anyone's time for training. I know lots of people that are unemployed (and get unemployment). You would think with all of that extra free time, they could finish more projects, learn new skills, or even get training. Unless they are forced, most just think of it as free money and don't appreciate it as much as they would if they earned it themselves. It's the same reason most people can't run a business and why most lottery winners end up losing it all within 5 years.
"It protects kids without trying to transition parenting responsibility to the state. In general, it keeps the state out of people's lives, increasing their dignity."
It doesn't really keep the state out of your life. It will create entire generations dependent on it. In fact, they will be directly controlling your life since many will start relying on that money to live.
"Yes, there will still be homeless people. There will be people who squander the money. But there will be many who take advantage of it and build a better life for themselves and all of their posterity. And I prefer to bet on the general desire of people to better themselves."
My issue still is that these costs will only increase over time. The middle class worker will see tax increases and there will be no incentive to get a minimum wage job, because you can just get it from the government. This will also have the added side effect of inflation.
The single worst thing you can do for someone disadvantaged is to give them a reason to stay exactly where they are in life (and no incentive to succeed at something more). A basic income does exactly this.
> If you are getting free money from the government, it means you can't manage your own life.
No particular offense to you, specifically, but this sentiment is something that makes me rage.
Therearenotenoughjobsforeverybody.
We have MORE than doubled productivity since 1970. That means that HALF the jobs since then have vaporized. Gone. Kaput. Never to be replaced.
If you were not "talented" enough to be born into a family that was college educated prior to 1980, you were in for a very hard time in the future--through no fault of your own. The biggest predictor of whether you will be poor is whether you were born to poor parents.
And, while everybody always mentions immigrants, I would like to point out that we have survivor bias. The immigrants that you know SUCCEEDED. Lots of them got lost along the way. Many of them are still poor--there is a reason they tend to congregate together in specific city sections.
"We have MORE than doubled productivity since 1970. That means that HALF the jobs since then have vaporized. Gone. Kaput. Never to be replaced."
There are lots of jobs that can't even be filled right now. Many jobs have vaporized, but there are also plenty of new positions.
With all of the support here for open source, do people even care that jobs have been lost as a result? As an example, my last company probably should have hired 5 developers. Instead, they just hired me and used a free open source product.
So you push for open source and new technology, which reduces jobs, and now expect a bailout from the middle class? Maybe we should have a tax paid for by technology and open source companies that have reduced jobs.
"If you were not "talented" enough to be born into a family that was college educated prior to 1980, you were in for a very hard time in the future--through no fault of your own"
People can still get into a trade..and make good money without going to college..yet all of the stats I've seen show this is not happening. Why?
"The biggest predictor of whether you will be poor is whether you were born to poor parents."
It really is a parenting problem. My parents never taught me about saving, compound interest, and long-term investments (not just thinking about what I am emotionally feeling now).
This doesn't mean I can't learn about these things later in life.
I would rather invest in more education (which can teach someone the skills to be successful in many aspects of life) than a basic income, which will potentially make a person dependent on it for their entire life.
> There are lots of jobs that can't even be filled right now. Many jobs have vaporized, but there are also plenty of new positions.
Sure. But mostly it's like this, the Natrona Heights, PA steel mill just got a very expensive reinvestment and retooling. It now employs about 600 when it used to employ 4,000.
And of those 600, most of those now require fairly technical training while the vast majority of the previous 4,000 jobs could be filled with a basic level of training.
So, you need at least 3,400 jobs to materialize out of thin air.
Even if I assume that you could magically turn all those people into engineers, until you show me where those 3,400 jobs are, the rest of your arguments are moot.
The only retort I ever get is: "Well, they should move." Move where? I can repeat that job-loss ratio for cites all over the US from big to small--Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Allentown, Poughkeepsie, Burlington, etc. So, you can't just move ALL of those city's population to Silicon Valley, Boston, and Austin (although the tech folks are trying very hard to disprove that statement with their actions by flooding those areas with people).
NOBODY has been able to tell me where those jobs that people should move to are. That's because they don't exist.
> People can still get into a trade..and make good money without going to college..yet all of the stats I've seen show this is not happening. Why?
Companies say they want more tradesmen. What they really want are cheaper tradesmen. I don't see salaries rising in the US, at least, so the job rate is at rough balance.
> So you push for open source and new technology, which reduces jobs, and now expect a bailout from the middle class?
I certainly don't wish to reverse automation--especially in things like steel mills where it replaces very dangerous jobs.
However, you can't just hang people out to dry either. Education doesn't magically make a job appear (just ask the non-technical PhD's about that).
So how do you handle a growing population size with an ever-shrinking job base? Do you force birth control on people who do not meet a certain level of financial independence? Do you take kids away from parents who lose that financial independence? Do you let people starve and freeze to death?
There is a mythos that everybody can just create and run their own startup, and the world can be fed on startups of O(1) size. I don't believe it (though I believe it can go a long way towards solving the problem), and, even if I did, startups still fail and people still need food, housing and warmth.
Governments don't have to take money from anyone to make this happen. They can just print it. Of course it amounts to the same thing, but everybody's money is dependent on the underlying financial system that is backed by governments (crypto-currencies are, slowly, making this less true).
I wonder how it would turn out if there was a single fund created to provide this living arrangement. Everybody is allowed to donate whatever they want to it (with no benefit other than knowing that they donated), then, any shortfall is met by printing the money, devaluing the currency in use equally for all.
I don't know that it's a good idea; it should be tested first, and, if it fails, we throw it out (unlike so many "big" ideas where, if and when it fails, the reason is always that "we didn't do it big enough, so we have to throw more at it"). The success criteria need to be well defined, but not politically motivated like so many ideas for providing for the poor. Like I said, I don't know how to get there from here.
My issue still is that these costs will only increase over time.
My argument is predicated on the idea that the cost of living will steadily decrease over time. If the cost of shipping approaches zero because everything can be JIT manufactured locally and the social interaction values of living in a city dwindle due to continually improved online interaction, the cost of living becomes food and shelter which don't need to be centralized in expensive cities.
Localized JIT manufacturing is going to massively upset the global economy. I don't see a way out short of massive government efforts to prevent technological progress (which I expect to see), but technology will march forward anyway. Is it better to move towards a new economic model that accounts for it or just deal with the revolution when 75% of people are unemployed?
The biggest risk factor, IMO, is cost of energy. We need it to be going down significantly, because it will take cheap energy to drive the JIT manufacturing that enables a very inexpensive minimum cost of living. I really do think we are in a race between a social collapse due to unemployment, hunger, and social disparity and copious free energy. And I think social collapse is currently winning, so if we could hold that off for a bit, both through reducing social unease and increasing funding in energy research, I'd really be OK with that.
The single worst thing you can do for someone disadvantaged is to give them a reason to stay exactly where they are in life (and no incentive to succeed at something more). A basic income does exactly this.
No, the single worst thing you can do is let them starve or freeze to death, because then their one and only life is over. And that literally happens to poor people. I consider this argument the "the poor are only poor because they are lazy, so anything that makes them more lazy will only make them worse" argument. And I believe it is a lazy argument in itself.
I've scrounged through cupboards hoping there was anything in them while my parents drank away whatever money they got. I get the potential negatives better than most people around here. But I also know that there are a lot of people who were just not fortunate to be born in the right place to the right parents with the right opportunities right in front of them.
"Do you force birth control on people who do not meet a certain level of financial independence? Do you take kids away from parents who lose that financial independence? Do you let people starve and freeze to death?""
I usually refuse to have discussions with people that use straw-man arguments and try to guilt me into siding with their opinion, but I will make this exception today.
If we had a basic income, how would you handle a growing amount of dependence on the system? In the beginning, we would still have people that were used to working..and they would be able to support everyone. But, as more and more people were born into the system (and used to the free money), there would be less and less money to pull from as a whole..and either the system would collapse completely or the government would pretty much have to take over private industry.
"I don't know that it's a good idea; it should be tested first, and, if it fails, we throw it out (unlike so many "big" ideas where, if and when it fails, the reason is always that "we didn't do it big enough, so we have to throw more at it"). The success criteria need to be well defined, but not politically motivated like so many ideas for providing for the poor. Like I said, I don't know how to get there from here."
Government programs don't really work this way. I don't think we could just "try it out" without wasting lots of taxpayer dollars.
"Is it better to move towards a new economic model that accounts for it or just deal with the revolution when 75% of people are unemployed?"
Again, you keep making these outlandish claims. How can I take you seriously?
JIT manufacturing isn't even close to taking out 75% of the jobs and it might not be close in our lifetimes. We might as well be discussing the potential of quantum teleportation technology putting the automotive industry out of business.
"No, the single worst thing you can do is let them starve or freeze to death, because then their one and only life is over."
Our poor are better than most countries in the world. Want to see real poverty? Go to India, Vietnam, Cambodia, or many countries in Africa.
"I consider this argument the "the poor are only poor because they are lazy, so anything that makes them more lazy will only make them worse" argument. And I believe it is a lazy argument in itself."
It's not laziness, it's just human nature. Any system needs to take into account human nature or it won't last..with painful results.
"I've scrounged through cupboards hoping there was anything in them while my parents drank away whatever money they got."
With freedom comes the freedom to destroy you or your kids lives. A basic income won't put a stop to this. What makes you think those same people won't take the money and continue to squander it?
One of my family members has always been poor. He finally got a job last year and makes 6 figures. We all thought that this would be a life-changing event. The result? He declared bankruptcy this year and can barely afford his mortgage.
Education is the key. Throwing more money at the problem without some sort of education won't solve the issue.
"Should I have been told to piss off because my parents couldn't pay for me to go to college? I had a high school diploma, so I had "enough", right?"
No, but if the tax payer does pay for your school (and you don't need to pay it back), you should be required to pick a major that has some chance of actually making you enough money to pay for the major.
"Where do you draw the line? How do you determine who is good enough and who isn't?"
We have many systems that already help the disadvantaged, but it never seems to be good enough. My taxes right now are close to 50% of my pay check, but it's never enough.
With great freedom comes great responsibility. If you are goin...
> If we had a basic income, how would you handle a growing amount of dependence on the system?
With economics. If you set the level of basic income too high for sustainability given current productivity and people's willingness to work given the support available, such that there is, in the short term, excessive dependency on it, then you'll be giving out lots of money and it will be chasing very few goods because there won't be much production -- which will very quickly drive inflation sky high, which will reduce the level of living standards provided by the basic income, which will increase the need to work and cure the problem of excessive dependency before it becomes a long-term problem with substantial durable cultural impact.
Of course, you don't want to hit that unstable point because of the short-term disruptions it causes, so you'd do best to start BI low, and gradually ramp it up while retiring other support programs. But, ultimately, basic economics limits BI well short of the point where any durable culture of dependency that relies on unsustainable levels of support sets in.
The lack of empathy on display here is astonishing. Is this quality a prerequisite to participating in the luckier side of the wealth-gap of silicon valley?
Empathy vs problem-solving is a false dichotomy. Having empathy helps to better understand the problem, and this understanding can lead to better solutions.
Most people here share the pain. I know guy with "good job" who lives in van. I personally would love to come to SV, but simply can not effort it with family.
Because there's a scary proportion of people in here saying things like:
- "how about they just move?"
- "the guy is a construction worker? they're in demand, just go to a construction office and get a job"
- "I don't get it. One person on video lives in nice bedsit (garage) and talks about homeless."
If I want to solve a problem, will a public display of empathy and outpouring of emotion produce a solution? Or will analysis will produce a solution?
Consider, if you will, that people have responded by looking for solutions. A true lack of empathy would be a response characterized by people professing apathy or ignoring this submission entirely.
It's quite unfortunate for these folks. I don't have an immediate solution other than what has already been said about increasing the supply of housing.
But the thing is there's this very valuable network in SV that's been built. Everywhere where some new innovation is happening, anywhere wealth is being created, you are going to get this sort of thing happening. People who are at the cutting edge will be moving ahead in income, but there's always going to be folks who aren't part of the party. So an income gap will pop up where there's all this wealth being generated.
I lived in London for a long time, and you saw the same. Millionaires' apartments in the same neighbourhood as council flats. Kids with chauffeurs, kids with free school meals.
I lived on the West Coast (Washington State and two places in California) for about ten years as a military wife. I had to leave California during my divorce because I could no longer afford it. I returned to California three years ago as a homeless person. I returned for my health. My medical condition is hellaciously debilitating and expensive to treat. Being not so sick to begin with both raises my quality of life and lowers my cost of living.
I currently live in San Diego County. I have plans to move within the next few months to someplace cheaper, because (in a nutshell) I would like to get off the street and I can't afford housing in this county. But, I plan to remain in California -- because the climate here and the far lower than the national average levels of ragweed do good things for my serious health problems.
So, I think it's an incredibly shitty position to take to say "just move." What you are saying is: Only rich people can live where they choose and the rest of y'all -- fuck you.
I will suggest that is not good for the nation as a whole. Fucking over too many people is a good way to eventually get to a place where the nation just doesn't work at all. Not being rich should not be the same thing as being a prisoner of your problems, with no real options.
We live in place with better climate than California, 100 meters from sea. Our total monthly expenses for 3 member family, are probably lower than most people in SV pay for rent. We rent nice house, insurances, school, etc...
Maybe you sort of overlooked the detail that I was a military wife (stated early in my above comment). I have lived in Georgia, Texas, Kansas, Washinton state, California, and Germany. I have driven through most states in the continental U.S. I spent a month on the gulf coast in Port Aransas on my way back to California. I returned to California from Georgia on foot and accepting rides, which took roughly two months (actual travel time, not counting the month spent in Port Aransas).
I am nearly 50 years old and I have been around the block a few times with my health issues, as well as all over the country. I am a LOT healthier in California than anywhere else.
This is not some psychological issue and it is not some untested hypothesis. It is a pretty thoroughly tested understanding of what helps keep me healthy for less than the average $100,000 annually my medical condition typically costs.
You don't have to understand my preferences. All you need to do is try to respect my right to decide for myself what is best for me.
Thinking you have a superior answer for my life after reading a couple of comments by me on the Internet and saying I should move to another country because you don't understand my choices is beyond insulting.
Would you rather not have any help? No one is forcing these individuals to take the assitance we are discussing here. If they want to continue to live 11 to a house or mom and 2 kids in a garage, we aren't discussing making it illegal.
I really have no idea why you seem intent on picking an argument with me. I currently don't get assistance and I am homeless, not living in overcrowded living conditions.
Stating my objections to people saying "well, just move" is not remotely the same thing as advocating for any particular solution. I imagine the solutions I would propose would be things most people here would say wasn't what is under discussion. I generally frame problems differently from most other people.
My genetic disorder costs on average $100,000 annually to keep me alive in a torturous fashion. My oldest son has the same condition. That's $200,000 annually that we "should" be spending on medical care. I am a former military wife. I am entitled to get that care through the military medical system -- which means at tax payer expense. Though, in reality, most people with my condition get a lot of that care covered by some kind of state aid and/or charitable program and the like (as well as often qualifying for disability in their 30s). Being sick all the damn time means you not only have high medical bills, you are also can't work.
We have gotten ourselves well and my productivity is rising. I no longer receive food stamps and I am now well enough to do freelance work to help support us.
Going someplace where the climate is good for my expensive medical condition is a financial win/win scenario, good not only for me but also for other people who would otherwise be getting stuck with the bill.
If you read much about homelessness, helping solve the problems of the homeless is typically cheaper than trying to "take care" of them while controlling their lives and so on.
You're partway there. You've made the case that some financial support is wise. You haven't made the case that it needs to be in a location of your choice, rather than the minimum needed to keep you as healthy as possible.
If the climate in San Francisco helps a person stay healthy, there are likely dramatically cheaper places that would have the same beneficial effect.
Assuming, of course, the goal being to produce the required effect for a minimum of cost.
I wasn't asking for financial support from anyone. I was only arguing against what has been stated in this discussion on HN: "just move." I have my reasons why I chose to come back to California.
Not that it is actually any of your business, but I don't currently get any kind of government "assistance."
I'm somewhat baffled as to what you are arguing with me about.
FWIW: Before my life got derailed, I planned to be an urban planner and took college classes with an eye towards understanding how best to make policy that serves the human population in that regard, not targeted at "helping poor people" but also not skewing things in a fashion that causes them unnecessary hardship, which is basically what we currently do.
My case is the same as it was previously: we may respect someone's decisions, but that doesn't mean we're going to put financing behind them.
In other words, the best way to help someone might not be handing them whatever addresses their most immediate problem. Controlling their lives to do things like administer medical treatment might produce better, cheaper, more reliable long-term outcomes. Is that "unnecessary hardship"?
Consider that SF's record of attempting to deliver services in-place to the homeless population has not made much of a dent in the size of the population.
we may respect someone's decisions, but that doesn't mean we're going to put financing behind them.
Sigh.
I am not sure if we are on the same page here with what we are trying to communicate. In some sense, you have to put money behind it in order to respect it, but perhaps not in any manner that you are meaning by that comment.
The current state of the U.S. housing situation grows out of the history of the past many decades, going back to at least WWII. During WWII, men went off the war and women got factory jobs, consumer items were rationed and car factories got converted to making military vehicles. You had a lot of de facto two income households with no kids and no means to have a child due to the man being on a different continent from the woman. During WWII, savings rates were as high as 50% during some years, just because there was no means to spend it all. Luxury items simply weren't available and people in the U.S. were being encouraged to grow Victory Gardens so that food grown on farms could be used to supply the military overseas.
The men came back home after WWII and they were entitled to VA benefits, including help buying a home. Practically overnight, the federal government put together the financial infrastructure to help large numbers of returning soldiers buy a house. There weren't enough houses to go around, in part because WWII was preceded by The Great Depression. So America also had to create the housing infrastructure overnight. This resulted in Levittowns going up all over the place, introducing suburbs to the nation.
At that point in time, the average new home was less than 1200 square feet, two bedrooms, one bath and housed a family with two adults and two to three children. By 2000, the average new house was over 2000 square feet and housed a family with two adults and only one child. We have diversified demographically and we now have a lot more elderly retired couples with no kids at home, single parents, and other non-nuclear families while at the same time having a lot fewer housing alternatives in real terms. During The Great Depression, things like SRO's and boarding houses were a lot more common. These days, if you are a single young person with not much of a paycheck, in most parts of the U.S., you wind up renting an apartment designed for a nuclear family and sharing it with roommates because there basically are no other viable alternatives.
This is all rooted in housing policy, which is very tied up in things like tax breaks and financing instruments. If you do not change policy in a way that makes money/financing instruments more accessible to people currently getting ugly labels because of their low income or lack of housing or what not -- because, in short, they fail to be what America wants to believe is some picture of success, as if that were context-neutral, which it very much is not -- then, no, you aren't ACTUALLY respecting people who are currently being screwed over royally by our current system.
Fixing it doesn't mean more government dole programs that control the lives of the recipients. It means altering national policy such that we genuinely need less of that because market solutions are more available to more people. Right now, housing policy and financing instruments tie the hands of a lot of people.
Anyway, I have work to do. I no longer get food stamps and I kind of would like to eat every day this month. So I need to excuse myself from further participating here, at least until I get some paid writing done.
I'm not saying that you can't live where you choose. I'm saying that if someone wants government help, the government, having limited resources and many people to help, should be very practical in how it leverages its resources. For example, if it takes 100k (if not a bit more) a year to help a small family escape poverty here, but moving them and escaping poverty in another city would cost far less and leave money to help the next family, it is better to do the most good for the most people.
Thanks for your story. "Just move" is not a solution. If someone talked to twenty homeless individuals, and asked them in-depth why they don't "just move", that person would probably stop thinking it's going to solve homelessness.
I'm all for programs to actually help people move, and get them support in their new location and etc. But that's not what most people here are talking about.
It's a shame they used a national statistic for income mobility of bottom 20%. While still not perfect, the area has the highest in the nation among large populations.
TLDR: Had an offer to relocate to Sillicon Valley, refused because of the poor/homeless people all around.
Full version:
A couple of years ago I had this offer to relocate to Sillicon Valley to work at my company's new office there. H1B visa, great salary, incredible project, a dream come true.
I live in Barcelona and there are few cities in the world which can compete with the Barcelona package, even during times of 'crisis' - great climate, beautiful architecture, laid back lifestyle and great cuisine.
San Francisco was one of those cities and I didn't want to miss the opportunity now that I had it. And Sillicon Valley - it's like coming to the centre of the tech world where history is being forged.
So I came over to explore and see if it makes sense to relocate.
It was my first time visiting the United States and I was so excited !
I had Scott McKenzie playing in my headphones when my train arrived in San Francisco. It was an emotional moment and I almost felt bad that I didn't have a flower in my hair :).
It felt incredible to be there. People were smiling and saying 'Hello', there were techies everywhere and the city looked very nice indeed. I went to Haight Ashbury and then the Golden Gate park, some guy offered me a joint and I just sat there listening to drummers and looking at the great, powerful oak (? pine ?) trees surrounding me.
The air, the drums, the joint put me in a state of trance and I felt as if the city started speaking to me - "Come here, in here there is power, this is the place to be if you want to change the world'. I've felt it's power, I felt it's might, I've felt that it's now or never.
But there was something else in it's tone. A kind of strange arrogance and slight bullying, a kind of 'either you're with me or get the fuck out of here' kind of vibe.
At first I didn't give it much thought when I saw the homeless people - drunks, addicts, ex cons, whatever... But then I started to notice that there's lots of them in the city and as it started to get dark, the streets became filled with these people - fucked up, strange and scary, outcasts, abandoned, ignored, useless... I almost ran back to the train station.
The next days that I stayed there I couldn't help but see homeless and the poor people everywhere and I just couldn't comprehend it.
How is it possible that the place were the greatest fortunes are made is filled with so many poor people ? I mean, I know it's their lives and they're responsible for that... but still ? Why did they get to this state ? Is the society there so 'cruel' that you either make it or fuck off ?
How come there are no homeless (or at least bum-looking) people in Barcelona ?
This contradiction was one of the reasons that I refused the offer to relocate. I can't explain it rationally - rational people don't base their decisions on such ridiculous details - but nevertheless it's been a big factor in my decision.
But there is food for thought there.
That said, I still want to come back to San Francisco and Sillicon Valley, seems like there's so much to explore there. And I know I will, probably soon and maybe then I will be able to understand it better.
But for now, it's in my list of mysteries.
It's a strange paradox. SF has such a large population of the indigent in no small part because the city is both very generous to the indigent and because the climate is permanently mild.
SF has a per captia homeless population well above average for the US.
> a kind of 'either you're with me or get the fuck out of here' kind of vibe
Oddly enough this is very common in bigger US cities, and not just a SV thing
> then I started to notice that there's lots of them in the city and as it started to get dark, the streets became filled with these people - fucked up, strange and scary, outcasts, abandoned, ignored, useless... I almost ran back to the train station
aside from the whole mental hospital dump [1], warmer climates tend to attract homeless for a variety of reasons (e.g., on the street + cold weather = gona have a bad time)
> How come there are no homeless (or at least bum-looking) people in Barcelona ?
279 comments
[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 302 ms ] threadIts cutesy, but distracts from the message.
probably many people here would not have read through a straight article with the same information. It's also more engaging and real - e.g. the video stories.
Edit: also the whole article is about the contrast with silicon valley. so having a new app-y interface to play with every second of the reading puts that contrast especially starkly. it certainly worked on me. (if I had read the same article in sfgate in the usual article format I dont think it would have had the same effect.)
Politically speaking, "left leaning" and "liberal" are both terms of 18th century origin, referring to the same kind of opponents of the centralized monarchic/oligarchic authority in favor of distribution of power to the people at large based on a conception of inherent rights; they certainly aren't opposite terms.
And the modern US liberal/conservative divide is a lot more about the purpose of government intervention than for/against it. (Both liberals and conservatives attack each other over different policies for supporting government control over individual freedom.)
The solution is simple. Set aside a square mile in each city on the peninsula and zone it such that it is illegal to build a building of less than 10 stories. At the same time, and more importantly, repeal both proposition 13 and rent control statutes.
For step 3, sit back and watch the California economy go into turbo drive as there is a massive construction boom, which funnels money away from rich landlords and into the pockets of ordinary construction workers and the service workers that support both them and the engineers the region's wealth is built on.
1 - http://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/07/opinion/reckonings-a-rent-... 2 - https://medium.com/@Scott_Wiener/yes-supply-demand-apply-to-...
There are also many areas zoned for a maximum height of zero feet.
As for how to be involved, start by looking up who your city councilperson is. Talking to them would be a good start.
The smartass in me wants to say, "then build subterranean homes/buildings" :)
Would suck in terms of natural lighting but it would be nice to see the faces of people who want those zones to be like that.
Though there is legislation in the works to limit maximum depth as well as height[2].
1 - http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/nov/09/billiona...
2 - http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014241278873238935045785595...
Source: http://www.jakecoolidgecartography.com/regional-rapid-transi...
Unfortunately, there is absolutely no chance of anything close to that being built in our lifetimes.
The problem is that unions will take advantage of all that money and increase wages and pension benefits for their workers instead of hiring more workers and increasing employment in general. This is what happens when there's an influx of money, it causes inflation.
The problem is that a lot of rich people live right along the Caltrain line and have been opposing its expansion for decades.
<sarcasm>But it's the unions' fault.</sarcasm>
Try not swallowing so much propaganda next time.
But that's a topic for another day. :-)
They're also planning on extending caltrain to downtown and connect with BART there
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore
A better idea would be to stop permitting any non-housing construction until the housing to job balance is restored.
More reasonable construction of 10 - 20 stories could easily be put up for that cost, even once you factor in the high cost of labor in CA.
1 - http://www.trulia.com/real_estate/Palo_Alto-California/ 2 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burj_Khalifa
If all those single-family houses were torn down and rebuilt as high-density, then surely the price per square foot would be cheaper. Property rights are pesky though.
Let developers buy them out. Or theoretically, they could just eminent-domain a bunch of houses.[0]
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London
Which makes the 40-foot height limit insane. http://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-density-thought... You could trivially build more housing by removing that limit. Some background: http://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Height_Limit_Revolt_Saves...
If you are the head of a large household living in an area where the cost of living is too high to support your dependents, you would do a whole lot of good for them and yourself by starting new in some other part of the country. At the very least it would be wise to relocate across the Bay.
I realize that people have families, social networks, and small-scale culture that they don't want to separate from. It's a sad reality, but sometimes the economic forces that re-balance labor markets require people to physically relocate. If your labor is not as valuable in a particular geographic region, it's time to retrain or move. For most people retraining is not an option...
My sentiment is not classist or elitist. The same argument applies to people of all socioeconomic backgrounds. I have personally relocated for financial reasons three times in my life. I moved away from home for college, I moved to a new location for my first job, then I recently relocated to the Bay Area because this was the optimal place for me to be economically. I did all this with very little money saved up and with no financial support outside my paycheck. It has been easier for me to keep in touch with my family than it would be for these people (I make enough to travel to visit family several times a year). However, I have made sacrifices and relocated for my personal financial well-being. If I had a family to look after, I would have (and arguably ought to have) sacrificed even more.
EDIT: That being said, I fully support relaxing regulation on the construction of new housing. It would be better if people didn't have to move, but I believe that even with optimal housing growth there would not be enough real estate to comfortably house the current lower-middle class population of SV.
I can see how one might feel 'just move' is a good argument, but really NO! In chinatowns all over the country, whenever low-income residents are being priced out, the argument is always 'you can just find another place to stay'. They've lived there for decades, if not more. That's where all the people they know are. They are poor but they do have a support system, that lives with them. When they move away, not only are they economically helpless, but also socially helpless.
To tell people to just 'move away' is very dense, IMHO. You might not feel the same way about places you live in, but some people feel VERY STRONGLY emotionally about where they live. Consider the fact that when there's natural disasters/flood/earthquake/radiation leaks, there's not insignificant percentage of people who would rather stay where they are and suffer the consequences rather than move away. Which is why evacuations often have to be FORCED! People would rather die than move away from their homes. You cannot just say 'they can just move away': the concerns are valid.
Those feelings are a luxury. Taxpayers should not be forced to bear the cost of someone's emotional attachments.
I would prefer tax dollars be spent on relocation assistance + job placement to help get people on a sustainable path.
In short, it is cheaper to build them houses and put them there, than to put them in prisons. Whether people get happy in places they like, or they get pissed at the system and live in prison, it's your tax dollars either way.
This solution makes me really uncomfortable.
You're completely disregarding the individual and saying that we are responsible for creating an environment for them and ultimately, we are responsible for their behavior.
These are independent, adult people who are perfectly capable of making their own decisions, good or bad, and living with the consequences of those decisions.
It shouldn't be the public's responsibility to remove them from neighborhoods or 'build them houses and put them there' as you said.
If low income people want to live in one of the most expensive areas in the world, they can. But they shouldn't expect to live well.
Yes, some people do have the story of "got laid off after 35 years, company stole my pension, now I'm homeless", or "had a long, expensive medical emergency, now am homeless". You can pinpoint the external force. But this piece showed one thing in particular that was striking: it seems it's rarely one major event that plunges someone into a bad situation like these (consider that none of these videos had one "this is what happened" sound bite). It seems like it's the snowball effect of bad decision after bad decision.
What do we do with people who are in really tough spots because of the compounding behavior of bad decisions? "We invest in the educational system so kids learn how to avoid these spots" -- ok, great, but what do we do with THESE people, today?
Accepting the "external forces" thing is a slippery slope, because now somebody is the arbiter of You Did It To Yourself vs. It's Not Your Fault. Who can we trust with that position? Is it even moral to make that judgement? Was this whole comment satire on being the arbiter of justice?
edit - it seems strange that many well paid technocrats will happily hold sway on the possibilities of sea-steading, or building fusion reactors, or anything involving a giant laser, or suchlike, but throw up their hands and declare the problem of houses for the poor people they or their workforce are displacing to be an insurmountable fact of the economy that can only be solved by the poor people moving to somewhere that hasn't yet become cool. And to be utterly cynical about the whole thing, if rich folk really want to build a city on a hill, they probably shouldn't price out all the trades if they want it to function in the long run.
If enough of us decide that emotions are worth supporting, why shouldn't taxpayers make that a priority?
I do not understand this insistence that money spent on building more housing here is bad whereas spending the same amount of money on having 'those people' move out of sight to somewhere else is somehow good.
Where does this housing get built? Why would you build it on some of the most expensive land (SV) in the lower 48?
I think the gap in your understanding is because you're just not listening to everyone telling you that the government's limited money will go further if it doesn't have to render/compensate landowners in the most expensive real estate market in the country.
It's ludicrous to suggest that the government spend money buying land to build co-op housing in SV.
A family on the edge doesn't always have the luxury to move.
You just think poor people should have to move out of their homes because rich people decided they want to live there. Got it.
> The same argument applies to people of all socioeconomic background.
Yeah, rich people get forced out of their homes because they can't afford them all the time. /s
The advice makes sense for the rich as well as the poor.
There are many houses on the market that fail or pass "rent vs buy" calculators - savings can go into diverse sources instead of a property if you so choose.
I'm of the opinion that the overall package is "worth it" here, but each person should consider their own evaluation metrics - and yes, move if you don't think it's worth it.
Note: this is certainly off-topic from the troubles of extremely poor people in this area.
Until your first layoff. Then it's an absolute blessing to live somewhere where your next job is one more exit up 101.
This is the thing that everybody who works in tech forgets. If you live in Pittsburgh, Tulsa, or Lubbock, you are in for a many month job search--or you are leaving the city--when (not if) you get laid off.
Seagate had this problem a couple years ago. They wanted VLSI layout people in Pittsburgh and were offering comparable to Silicon Valley money--and nobody from the tech cities would bite. Why? Everybody knew that they were going to be the most highly paid people in the office and subject to getting axed first. And would then have to move back to Silicon Valley.
The Bay Area is not the only place with a high amount of tech jobs. Sure it may have the most but there's many other cities with plenty of openings.
Searching "software engineer" job listings on LinkedIn[1] shows:
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/job/software-engineer-jobs/I'm hoping to be able to save ~$240k and buy a modest house on the outskirts of Portland or Tacoma and have a little left over.
I'm just wondering if there's anywhere else where I could save money like this?
So if we want to outlaw rent control, we should outlaw fixed rate mortgages too, and eliminate the artificial cap on property taxes (something that corporations exploit by using shell companies to 'own' commercial real estate, and then transferring ownership or voting control of the shell company while shielding themselves from property tax on the current value of the real estate). But we both know that that's not likely to happen.
No. It began in SF as a very-specific response to Prop 13, which is essentially property-tax-control
Both are bad policies in terms of market distortion and are often the overlooked elephants in the room in discussion of housing supply and affordability.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_rent_control_in_Engl...
That isn't how this works, at all. When the number of people who want to live in an area > the area's capacity, prices increase. See: every metro area in the world.
> Yeah, rich people get forced out of their homes because they can't afford them all the time. /s
Rich people move to optimize their finances all the time.
http://www.sfgate.com/business/networth/article/State-leader...
http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/world/2014/February/Frances-Recko...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/dalebuss/2014/04/27/it-makes-sen...
http://www.aei.org/publication/companies-are-leaving-califor...
If rich people living around you only affected house prices then you'd be right, but they tend to push the cost of everything up. That's what drives poor people out.
It's like people think this situation is new, and poor people are the "real" natives of SV. If those damn facebooks and googles had left the valley alone everything would be great!
Actually, in some places (certain NYC or London neighborhoods), the rich are getting pushed out by the ultrarich. What chance does a mere millionaire have against billionaires?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/02/19/h...
I'm not poor by any means, but if SF rents keep going up, I'm going to be leaving if I can't find affordable housing (even on a relatively high salary).
My point is that it might not be fair that low-income folks have to move when housing gets more expensive, but it doesn't stop with low-income. I'm sure plenty of middle-income folks have been forced out of the Bay area as well.
If you're hand-to-mouth poor, you cannot afford a rental truck, let alone time off work and still feed your children. You will probably lose your job if you move, and not find another one where you land, especially if you're in the service industry. Good luck with that East bay -> peninsula commute on your minimum wage. The reason many cannot get jobs other places is due to felonies or other legal issues related to being poor.
If your children are in school a lot of parents would actually rather struggle than put their family through the trauma of a move, even if in the end it may be better.
American society is more mobile than others, but poverty (outside of vagrancy) is extremely restricting.
I do think your main thesis is correct (this is unmaintainable, gtfo), but moving is a multi-year struggle of planning and saving at these low levels of income.
This is at it's core class struggle, not individual unawareness.
If they could magically keep their Bay Area income while being anywhere else, they might be.
But since they can't actually do that, I'm not sure what relevance that has.
I've seen a few commenters here suggesting using government money to ship 'em out, or retrain or job-place them, but I wonder: what do the poor in Silicon Valley want for their lives? Do they want to be shipped out? To be retrained? Better wages? Cheaper housing?
These are people, after all, and are worthy of being involved in any discussion concerning their fate.
You've said, ship 'em out! Retrain them! If they don't want to do those things, do nothing. What I'm going for is: ask them, too.
It makes very little sense to try to have a conversation about solving a community's problem without listening to members of that community.
It seems you have misunderstood my point. I'm not saying to load them up and ship them out. I'm saying that if they want help, the best utilization of limited resources will be in helping them move somewhere more affordable. But they don't have to accept help; it isn't being forced on them.
I'm saying offer options, not enforce demands.
Our conversation is now going something like this:
You: If they want to move, move them, otherwise do nothing
Me: Ask them what they want
You: I'm not saying they have to move, just that that's what we can do
Me: Ask them what they want
You: You misunderstand, they don't have to move, but that's their option if they want help
Me: Ask them what they want
Are we going to keep going back and forth like this all day?
So sure, have a conversation and find out where they want to be in their life, but it's madness to think they'll give you insight into how to fix what got them there.
Many of the other fixes talk about changing laws, and my suggestion was basically in the scenario that those don't work. (I do grant that a law change would cost the government some money to implement, new permits, ect.; I just consider such costs when broken down per person help to be effectively zero and to, in large part, already be paid for by all the already hired staff.)
So I guess the question to you is... what about all the poor people in every other state. Have you asked them what they want to be done, so we can fairly allocate money? We could give those in need in SV ($TheirPoor * $BudgeToHelpThePoor)/$TotalPoor and let them spend it on what they want and if they run out, tell them tough luck.
On a side note, what happens to the average individual who wins big in the lottery?
A subsidised construction boom tied to population growth, for instance, would tend to help those on median to low incomes twice over. Once by keeping a lid on the cost of housing and secondly by providing a greater availability of reasonably well paid employment. It also helps those on higher incomes (as long as they are not those whose income is merely dependent on continually soaring house prices), both directly in lower rental costs and indirectly by reducing the cost of local services.
What needs to be understood is that we cannot force the cost of living to drop, and we cannot force the median income to rise.
Either search for a job that pays more, or search for a home that costs less. If that means moving away from where you grew up, then sorry, but that's literally your best option.
Is it fair? No - but life isn't fair. If you find yourself living in a place that you cannot afford, then you are the problem, not the world around you. Fix your own life, because nobody is going to do it for you.
That's exactly what rent control does. I guess it's ok to not even try to make an argument on HN these days.
The ROI on apartments drops substantially, so investors aren't incentivized to make new buildings, but instead maintain their current ones as cheaply as possible until they're unserviceable.
What you're really describing is a lower standard of living, not merely a lower cost of living.
Come on. It's not as though the circumstances that created "Silicon Valley" were natural and beyond the control of anyone; why should we turn around and pretend the side effects were (well, other than it being convenient)?
I know not everybody can divorce themselves from all of their belongings, especially large families. Additionally, I didn't have to worry about schools (no children) or work (my industry has ~0 unemployment). I did, however, have to worry about saving enough to survive between jobs and finding an affordable place to stay.
> This is at it's core class struggle, not individual unawareness. I agree, but I think part of the solution has to involve helping people relocate. We should also strive to encourage a more distributed social life. If we had inexpensive, high quality video telecommunications I believe that people would be more okay with moving away from their families.
We should also strive to encourage a more distributed social life.
Why? I'm not the most gregarious person and I am OK with telephones and video, but it's a far cry from meeting people you care about in person. The problem with helping people relocate rather than deal with these issues at their source is that you wind up with economic cleansing, large enclaves and entire cities where only the wealthy can live and others where only the poor can afford to reside. Naturally there are few economic opportunities in communities of poor people, so people who live in them have to travel ever farther to get to their jobs, with increased cost in fuel/transit fares and diminishing marginal utility of labor due to the extra commute time.
The thing is, the same dynamic is at work to varying degrees all over the country so it's far from obvious where people who are economically dislocated should move to.
Households on minimum wage are often paycheck to paycheck, and thus have no buffer with which to even find a roof in a new city, much less hunt for a job in a less-reliable industry.
Also, familial connections are not just purely for joy - they may provide some amount of free childcare that would become a financial burden after moving away.
Places like the Puget Sound and the Bay Area are going to keep getting populated with tech workers, and they are going to keep rising in cost.
Moving isn't hard. It sucks to feel kicked out of the city you live in, but there isn't much that can be done. If you can't afford it, move somewhere that you can.
I hate gentrification, but what can we do to avoid it? Ban high-paying jobs? Maybe one day all of this will bite us in the ass, but if you find yourself on the receiving end right now, do the best thing you can for yourself and get out!
You think scraping together five fucking grand "isn't hard" for someone who's hand-to-mouth poor?
> If you can't afford it, move somewhere that you can.
"What if you can't afford TO MOVE" is the entire point of the post you responded to.
Charity idea: provide moving & job placement help to get homeless or nearly homeless families into lower cost of living areas.
I always have mixed feelings about stories like this. Like the woman from the first video: homeless, just got a garage for her and her 18-month-old. Pregnant again. Kids do not make your financial situation better or life less stressful.
The kids didn't ask for poverty and it's not their fault -- all true. But what do we do, enforce reproduction strategy at gunpoint?
That said, I really lost a lot of sympathy for the woman in the garage though, kids are hugely expensive (about a quarter million dollars to raise them to 18) and I just can't understand how she thought having a second kid would improve her situation. Obviously it could have been an accident or similar, but damn, maybe now isn't the right time for a second kid!
I'm probably just a first world asshole with no sense of what it must be like in her position.
It would be a very different calculus if any of us were in that woman's situation. Maybe she made a bad decision. Maybe someone told her she'd be much more likely to get public assistance with two children than one, and she's ashamed to admit it. Maybe she was coerced into sex in exchange for money or because her personal safety was threatened. I very much doubt that she just decided it was a Friday, and a good time to get her sexy on.
No need for gunpoint. Making access to reproductive options legal, safe, widely available, and well-publicized is probably good enough.
Of course there are an infinite number of other factors involved, especially when money is thrown into it, but this has been my experience when talking with people.
The word optimal is doing a hell of a lot of heavy lifting here.
The other question is (don't know the answer) how many people who owned homes (instead of renting) were able to cash in in some way on rising property values?
My guess is that at least some of the people renting made the decision to not purchase and some of the people owning made the decision to not rent. Of the people who could choose an option.
As far as people saying "it costs money to move" what about one family member moving and the other staying until a life is established elsewhere? [1]
Maybe what is needed instead of handouts is some kind of social service that makes people aware of their options. Edit: And pushes them to take those options even if they are painful. And also to make them realize that "even though you don't want to move because your friends and family are here" you might have to move if you can't afford this place anymore.
Note: I don't live in California and have no skin in this game.
[1] And lastly, has the "problem" even been properly quantified? I watch stories similar to this on TV news reports. They always pick the right people that you seem to be able to relate to and a situation that always seems unjust. But they never show exactly how many people actually are like that person (or even not like that person). They pull at your emotional heartstrings because their job is to make the story attractive, not necessarily balanced. And when they do they always add the "to be sure" that gets them off the hook. As in "to be sure not everyone who is homeless is XYZ" etc.
I am guessing that some people think that there is so much money sloshing around the Valley that taxes should be higher to take care of those in need. The potential problem there is that you simply encourage more people to stay or actually even more people to move to the area to take advantage of that benefit.
Finding a food service or house cleaning or landscaping job in a depressed, but affordable, city like Redding or its ilk is going to be way, way harder than in a more expensive place.
Add to this that once you lose your car, you can't live or work outside of a city with functional public transportation. None of those are cities are going to be dirt cheap.
The fact you fail to recognise it as elitist doesn't mean it isn't. You are elitist because you fail to understand that life can be a great deal harder for other people. "I did it so they can too" assumes that other people don't live in circumstances that prevent them doing things. That is plain wrong.
If I had a family to look after, I would have (and arguably ought to have) sacrificed even more.
One of the things you might have had to sacrifice is having enough money to relocate.
One family in the article has two parents both with full time jobs. And they're living in a homeless shelter. I understand that they can't afford $3,000 per month rent in the city. But how is it that they don't have enough money to relocate? Even a few miles away to something more affordable?
If the father works in construction, that's skill that is in high demand and easily transferable. You can walk into a construction office tomorrow and be swinging a hammer by Monday right?
There must be more going on. Some important piece of the puzzle is being withheld from their story.
The notion of re-balancing forces is a nice simple story but the price of housing relative to income has risen nationwide for decades. There is a similar story for medical care and even food.
So yes it's fun to believe in the invisible hand and Adam Smith's 200 year old thesis. But the reality is that the value of all labor is simply being driven downward.
Smith was keenly aware of the dangers of mercantilism and WoN is anything but an argument for unrestrained capitalism. Indeed, the second most observation in the book, after the one about the fact that butchers and bakers are motivated by self-interest rather than generosity, is that “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
The forces of the market are not the forces of nature, and we make the rules (or, at least, shape them greatly).
> I make enough to travel to visit family several times a year
are you serious, dude? leave the advice giving for people who have actually been poor and understand the logistic difficulties of poverty. "just move"? you have the freedom to move to the most economically optimal place for you, and you think THAT is equivalent to the situation of a family living hand to mouth in transitional housing or section 8?
YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT.
Together with my cofounders over two years we have built an amazing company and product (and we still have a ways to go). This would not be possible outside of Silicon Valley, and our trajectory would look much different (worse) if we lived in, say, Montana.
On the other hand, some sub areas are bound geographically and can't expand horizontally, so the only way is upwards, which faces even more resistance.
On top of this, no one has a natural right to live in a specific area. At the same time society has a responsibility to provide reasonably affordable living space for lower income residents. However, it doesn't necessarily mean it has to be in the posh areas of town.
Still as land prices increase, is it even possible to build in areas of high land prices? Where does that money come from? Do we divert taxes to that effort rather than building that same housing in areas where that money would go further?
With regard to people not being able to move away due to cost, there are lots of people who move to the US with nothing but a few dollars and an address. It's possible. I guess the question is do we want to put our own citizens in this kind of predicament?
For every software engineer in the Bay Area there is an army of waiters, cooks, janitors, sanitation workers, retail workers, office workers, school teachers, nurses, and unskilled laborers that supports him. And if you move them all out, well, I don't think that I have to explain the consequences of that action.
People build up support structures - extended family, close friends, church and hobby/interest ares. The cost of moving once you have a family is a often a whole lot higher than easily quantifiable dollar values.
I am struggling to find the name of the program in the article in order to see if it has "worked" in any way to reduce homelessness. Not sure if it is even still around.
EDIT: It's called Project Reconnect[2] and it is still around even though De Blasio apparently was against it[3]
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/29/nyregion/29oneway.html [2] http://www1.nyc.gov/nyc-resources/service/3601/project-recon... [3] http://nypost.com/2014/09/06/de-blasio-has-sent-1412-homeles...
Exactly. Millions of immigrants uproot themselves and move every year. Yeah, it sucks for the first few years, but then it becomes better. America had its share of mass migrations in the middle part of last century; but for some reason people don't want to move as much these days.
If you plug this salary into a loan calculator and assume ($50k/year for tution and living expenses) that's 200k in debt at graduation.
No one in the Silicon Valley makes enough to cover that.
The assumption then is that people will have parents who help them out through college. Ergo, there is no real social mobility because you need a certain type of parent to ensure you don't have student debt that leaves you in the red even with a high tech job.
The valley and SF just rich kids getting richer while screwing over everyone else.
Uh, no.
I felt like I was reading a highschooler's Power Point...
I agree with increasing building density, but there is a large group already employed in SV/SF that will move into that housing from a 4hr radius around the area. Still would be interested to see a projection that would model this possibility.
Good modeling of the possible outcomes is the first step on the rocky road to getting Bay Area zoning changed. Not holding my breath.
Build enough, and there is affordable housing for everyone. Engineers need places to live too.
San Mateo is expensive. Very expensive. Outside of direct market distortions like subsidized low income housing, it will always be too expensive for many people to live there. As many challenges as she faces in moving, she'll face more trying to raise a child in a garage.
Speaking as a once single mom with an extensive technical resume, finding a job can be next to impossible. Regardless, living in the city increases the chance.
B) She says in the video that she makes good money.
C) Our communities do better with more income/etc diversity (http://www.urban.org/publications/411955.html).
I think they placed her there in the beginning so that your average white middle-class CNN viewer could relate a bit more to the stories of the homeless to come.
And if so, how do early stage founders who aren't already rich manage to get by?
On $100k, you wouldn't really be able to save very much, so the idea that you could somehow "escape poverty" while raising a family in Silicon Valley on that salary is somewhat of a stretch.
In Silicon Valley, a "middle class" family typically means two highly educated adults each earning six figure incomes.
It's really a meaningless numbers game - no matter where you live, you have to trim your lifestyle to what your income supports.
Part of the trouble is that income taxes are not based on local economies, so they'd be taxed as if they were quite well off even though they're struggling.
A startup founder is not likely to have dependents so can divide by 4, and then not worry about things like how good the school district is. Although they may not be "rich" in the conventional sense, they likely have an education and connections that the guys who are stocking the grocery shelves can only dream of, and parents or someone else they can always fall back on if worst comes to worst.
If they want to fix the problem they'd need large tracts of very high grade housing rented non-profit, (never sold) on government land. The competition from this would drive prices through the floor.
A 10%-20% price difference is irrelevant and will just disappear in just a few years anyway.
At some point prices will make employing people there impracticable due to wages and commercial rental. In the current system, that is the price point the market will reach no mater how many units are built.
If anything SF has become more centralized and companies keep paying high salaries and other perks playing in to the whole thing.
The largest predictor of educational success, like you said, is money. You can try to equalize, but the rich will always find ways to spend more money on their children's education.
I don't think there is a solution as long as America's rising inequality continues.
I prefer a minimum living stipend for a few reasons: It doesn't treat the poor like they are too stupid or too criminal to manage their own lives and their own money. It allows people the ability to move to more fulfilling (and more lucrative) employment by providing time for training. It protects kids without trying to transition parenting responsibility to the state. In general, it keeps the state out of people's lives, increasing their dignity.
Yes, there will still be homeless people. There will be people who squander the money. But there will be many who take advantage of it and build a better life for themselves and all of their posterity. And I prefer to bet on the general desire of people to better themselves.
The problem is I don't know how to get there from here.
The issue with this is that once you start giving a basic living allowance, more and more people will continue to rely on it over time and the system will eventually collapse.
"I prefer a minimum living stipend for a few reasons: It doesn't treat the poor like they are too stupid or too criminal to manage their own lives and their own money."
It's not their money, it's money given to them by the tax payers..and I don't agree with you reasoning. If you are getting free money from the government, it means you can't manage your own life. I don't really see how this will change the view on the disadvantaged.
"It allows people the ability to move to more fulfilling (and more lucrative) employment by providing time for training."
I don't think this would increase anyone's time for training. I know lots of people that are unemployed (and get unemployment). You would think with all of that extra free time, they could finish more projects, learn new skills, or even get training. Unless they are forced, most just think of it as free money and don't appreciate it as much as they would if they earned it themselves. It's the same reason most people can't run a business and why most lottery winners end up losing it all within 5 years.
"It protects kids without trying to transition parenting responsibility to the state. In general, it keeps the state out of people's lives, increasing their dignity."
It doesn't really keep the state out of your life. It will create entire generations dependent on it. In fact, they will be directly controlling your life since many will start relying on that money to live.
"Yes, there will still be homeless people. There will be people who squander the money. But there will be many who take advantage of it and build a better life for themselves and all of their posterity. And I prefer to bet on the general desire of people to better themselves."
My issue still is that these costs will only increase over time. The middle class worker will see tax increases and there will be no incentive to get a minimum wage job, because you can just get it from the government. This will also have the added side effect of inflation.
The single worst thing you can do for someone disadvantaged is to give them a reason to stay exactly where they are in life (and no incentive to succeed at something more). A basic income does exactly this.
No particular offense to you, specifically, but this sentiment is something that makes me rage.
There are not enough jobs for everybody.
We have MORE than doubled productivity since 1970. That means that HALF the jobs since then have vaporized. Gone. Kaput. Never to be replaced.
If you were not "talented" enough to be born into a family that was college educated prior to 1980, you were in for a very hard time in the future--through no fault of your own. The biggest predictor of whether you will be poor is whether you were born to poor parents.
And, while everybody always mentions immigrants, I would like to point out that we have survivor bias. The immigrants that you know SUCCEEDED. Lots of them got lost along the way. Many of them are still poor--there is a reason they tend to congregate together in specific city sections.
There are lots of jobs that can't even be filled right now. Many jobs have vaporized, but there are also plenty of new positions.
With all of the support here for open source, do people even care that jobs have been lost as a result? As an example, my last company probably should have hired 5 developers. Instead, they just hired me and used a free open source product.
So you push for open source and new technology, which reduces jobs, and now expect a bailout from the middle class? Maybe we should have a tax paid for by technology and open source companies that have reduced jobs.
"If you were not "talented" enough to be born into a family that was college educated prior to 1980, you were in for a very hard time in the future--through no fault of your own"
People can still get into a trade..and make good money without going to college..yet all of the stats I've seen show this is not happening. Why?
"The biggest predictor of whether you will be poor is whether you were born to poor parents."
It really is a parenting problem. My parents never taught me about saving, compound interest, and long-term investments (not just thinking about what I am emotionally feeling now).
This doesn't mean I can't learn about these things later in life.
I would rather invest in more education (which can teach someone the skills to be successful in many aspects of life) than a basic income, which will potentially make a person dependent on it for their entire life.
Sure. But mostly it's like this, the Natrona Heights, PA steel mill just got a very expensive reinvestment and retooling. It now employs about 600 when it used to employ 4,000.
And of those 600, most of those now require fairly technical training while the vast majority of the previous 4,000 jobs could be filled with a basic level of training.
So, you need at least 3,400 jobs to materialize out of thin air.
Even if I assume that you could magically turn all those people into engineers, until you show me where those 3,400 jobs are, the rest of your arguments are moot.
The only retort I ever get is: "Well, they should move." Move where? I can repeat that job-loss ratio for cites all over the US from big to small--Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Allentown, Poughkeepsie, Burlington, etc. So, you can't just move ALL of those city's population to Silicon Valley, Boston, and Austin (although the tech folks are trying very hard to disprove that statement with their actions by flooding those areas with people).
NOBODY has been able to tell me where those jobs that people should move to are. That's because they don't exist.
> People can still get into a trade..and make good money without going to college..yet all of the stats I've seen show this is not happening. Why?
Companies say they want more tradesmen. What they really want are cheaper tradesmen. I don't see salaries rising in the US, at least, so the job rate is at rough balance.
> So you push for open source and new technology, which reduces jobs, and now expect a bailout from the middle class?
I certainly don't wish to reverse automation--especially in things like steel mills where it replaces very dangerous jobs.
However, you can't just hang people out to dry either. Education doesn't magically make a job appear (just ask the non-technical PhD's about that).
There is a mythos that everybody can just create and run their own startup, and the world can be fed on startups of O(1) size. I don't believe it (though I believe it can go a long way towards solving the problem), and, even if I did, startups still fail and people still need food, housing and warmth.
Governments don't have to take money from anyone to make this happen. They can just print it. Of course it amounts to the same thing, but everybody's money is dependent on the underlying financial system that is backed by governments (crypto-currencies are, slowly, making this less true).
I wonder how it would turn out if there was a single fund created to provide this living arrangement. Everybody is allowed to donate whatever they want to it (with no benefit other than knowing that they donated), then, any shortfall is met by printing the money, devaluing the currency in use equally for all.
I don't know that it's a good idea; it should be tested first, and, if it fails, we throw it out (unlike so many "big" ideas where, if and when it fails, the reason is always that "we didn't do it big enough, so we have to throw more at it"). The success criteria need to be well defined, but not politically motivated like so many ideas for providing for the poor. Like I said, I don't know how to get there from here.
My issue still is that these costs will only increase over time.
My argument is predicated on the idea that the cost of living will steadily decrease over time. If the cost of shipping approaches zero because everything can be JIT manufactured locally and the social interaction values of living in a city dwindle due to continually improved online interaction, the cost of living becomes food and shelter which don't need to be centralized in expensive cities.
Localized JIT manufacturing is going to massively upset the global economy. I don't see a way out short of massive government efforts to prevent technological progress (which I expect to see), but technology will march forward anyway. Is it better to move towards a new economic model that accounts for it or just deal with the revolution when 75% of people are unemployed?
The biggest risk factor, IMO, is cost of energy. We need it to be going down significantly, because it will take cheap energy to drive the JIT manufacturing that enables a very inexpensive minimum cost of living. I really do think we are in a race between a social collapse due to unemployment, hunger, and social disparity and copious free energy. And I think social collapse is currently winning, so if we could hold that off for a bit, both through reducing social unease and increasing funding in energy research, I'd really be OK with that.
The single worst thing you can do for someone disadvantaged is to give them a reason to stay exactly where they are in life (and no incentive to succeed at something more). A basic income does exactly this.
No, the single worst thing you can do is let them starve or freeze to death, because then their one and only life is over. And that literally happens to poor people. I consider this argument the "the poor are only poor because they are lazy, so anything that makes them more lazy will only make them worse" argument. And I believe it is a lazy argument in itself.
I've scrounged through cupboards hoping there was anything in them while my parents drank away whatever money they got. I get the potential negatives better than most people around here. But I also know that there are a lot of people who were just not fortunate to be born in the right place to the right parents with the right opportunities right in front of them.
I we...
I usually refuse to have discussions with people that use straw-man arguments and try to guilt me into siding with their opinion, but I will make this exception today.
If we had a basic income, how would you handle a growing amount of dependence on the system? In the beginning, we would still have people that were used to working..and they would be able to support everyone. But, as more and more people were born into the system (and used to the free money), there would be less and less money to pull from as a whole..and either the system would collapse completely or the government would pretty much have to take over private industry.
"I don't know that it's a good idea; it should be tested first, and, if it fails, we throw it out (unlike so many "big" ideas where, if and when it fails, the reason is always that "we didn't do it big enough, so we have to throw more at it"). The success criteria need to be well defined, but not politically motivated like so many ideas for providing for the poor. Like I said, I don't know how to get there from here."
Government programs don't really work this way. I don't think we could just "try it out" without wasting lots of taxpayer dollars.
"Is it better to move towards a new economic model that accounts for it or just deal with the revolution when 75% of people are unemployed?"
Again, you keep making these outlandish claims. How can I take you seriously?
JIT manufacturing isn't even close to taking out 75% of the jobs and it might not be close in our lifetimes. We might as well be discussing the potential of quantum teleportation technology putting the automotive industry out of business.
"No, the single worst thing you can do is let them starve or freeze to death, because then their one and only life is over."
Our poor are better than most countries in the world. Want to see real poverty? Go to India, Vietnam, Cambodia, or many countries in Africa.
"I consider this argument the "the poor are only poor because they are lazy, so anything that makes them more lazy will only make them worse" argument. And I believe it is a lazy argument in itself."
It's not laziness, it's just human nature. Any system needs to take into account human nature or it won't last..with painful results.
"I've scrounged through cupboards hoping there was anything in them while my parents drank away whatever money they got."
With freedom comes the freedom to destroy you or your kids lives. A basic income won't put a stop to this. What makes you think those same people won't take the money and continue to squander it?
One of my family members has always been poor. He finally got a job last year and makes 6 figures. We all thought that this would be a life-changing event. The result? He declared bankruptcy this year and can barely afford his mortgage.
Education is the key. Throwing more money at the problem without some sort of education won't solve the issue.
"Should I have been told to piss off because my parents couldn't pay for me to go to college? I had a high school diploma, so I had "enough", right?"
No, but if the tax payer does pay for your school (and you don't need to pay it back), you should be required to pick a major that has some chance of actually making you enough money to pay for the major.
"Where do you draw the line? How do you determine who is good enough and who isn't?"
We have many systems that already help the disadvantaged, but it never seems to be good enough. My taxes right now are close to 50% of my pay check, but it's never enough.
With great freedom comes great responsibility. If you are goin...
With economics. If you set the level of basic income too high for sustainability given current productivity and people's willingness to work given the support available, such that there is, in the short term, excessive dependency on it, then you'll be giving out lots of money and it will be chasing very few goods because there won't be much production -- which will very quickly drive inflation sky high, which will reduce the level of living standards provided by the basic income, which will increase the need to work and cure the problem of excessive dependency before it becomes a long-term problem with substantial durable cultural impact.
Of course, you don't want to hit that unstable point because of the short-term disruptions it causes, so you'd do best to start BI low, and gradually ramp it up while retiring other support programs. But, ultimately, basic economics limits BI well short of the point where any durable culture of dependency that relies on unsustainable levels of support sets in.
Most people here share the pain. I know guy with "good job" who lives in van. I personally would love to come to SV, but simply can not effort it with family.
Consider, if you will, that people have responded by looking for solutions. A true lack of empathy would be a response characterized by people professing apathy or ignoring this submission entirely.
But the thing is there's this very valuable network in SV that's been built. Everywhere where some new innovation is happening, anywhere wealth is being created, you are going to get this sort of thing happening. People who are at the cutting edge will be moving ahead in income, but there's always going to be folks who aren't part of the party. So an income gap will pop up where there's all this wealth being generated.
I lived in London for a long time, and you saw the same. Millionaires' apartments in the same neighbourhood as council flats. Kids with chauffeurs, kids with free school meals.
I lived on the West Coast (Washington State and two places in California) for about ten years as a military wife. I had to leave California during my divorce because I could no longer afford it. I returned to California three years ago as a homeless person. I returned for my health. My medical condition is hellaciously debilitating and expensive to treat. Being not so sick to begin with both raises my quality of life and lowers my cost of living.
I currently live in San Diego County. I have plans to move within the next few months to someplace cheaper, because (in a nutshell) I would like to get off the street and I can't afford housing in this county. But, I plan to remain in California -- because the climate here and the far lower than the national average levels of ragweed do good things for my serious health problems.
So, I think it's an incredibly shitty position to take to say "just move." What you are saying is: Only rich people can live where they choose and the rest of y'all -- fuck you.
I will suggest that is not good for the nation as a whole. Fucking over too many people is a good way to eventually get to a place where the nation just doesn't work at all. Not being rich should not be the same thing as being a prisoner of your problems, with no real options.
We live in place with better climate than California, 100 meters from sea. Our total monthly expenses for 3 member family, are probably lower than most people in SV pay for rent. We rent nice house, insurances, school, etc...
I am nearly 50 years old and I have been around the block a few times with my health issues, as well as all over the country. I am a LOT healthier in California than anywhere else.
This is not some psychological issue and it is not some untested hypothesis. It is a pretty thoroughly tested understanding of what helps keep me healthy for less than the average $100,000 annually my medical condition typically costs.
Just try Greece for couple of months. Doctors are great here, speak english and are much cheaper.
Thinking you have a superior answer for my life after reading a couple of comments by me on the Internet and saying I should move to another country because you don't understand my choices is beyond insulting.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StopHelpingMe
But thank you for the apology. It's a step in the right direction.
Stating my objections to people saying "well, just move" is not remotely the same thing as advocating for any particular solution. I imagine the solutions I would propose would be things most people here would say wasn't what is under discussion. I generally frame problems differently from most other people.
We might respect it, but you haven't made a convincing case that we need to craft policy around financially supporting it.
My genetic disorder costs on average $100,000 annually to keep me alive in a torturous fashion. My oldest son has the same condition. That's $200,000 annually that we "should" be spending on medical care. I am a former military wife. I am entitled to get that care through the military medical system -- which means at tax payer expense. Though, in reality, most people with my condition get a lot of that care covered by some kind of state aid and/or charitable program and the like (as well as often qualifying for disability in their 30s). Being sick all the damn time means you not only have high medical bills, you are also can't work.
We have gotten ourselves well and my productivity is rising. I no longer receive food stamps and I am now well enough to do freelance work to help support us.
Going someplace where the climate is good for my expensive medical condition is a financial win/win scenario, good not only for me but also for other people who would otherwise be getting stuck with the bill.
If you read much about homelessness, helping solve the problems of the homeless is typically cheaper than trying to "take care" of them while controlling their lives and so on.
If the climate in San Francisco helps a person stay healthy, there are likely dramatically cheaper places that would have the same beneficial effect.
Assuming, of course, the goal being to produce the required effect for a minimum of cost.
Not that it is actually any of your business, but I don't currently get any kind of government "assistance."
I'm somewhat baffled as to what you are arguing with me about.
FWIW: Before my life got derailed, I planned to be an urban planner and took college classes with an eye towards understanding how best to make policy that serves the human population in that regard, not targeted at "helping poor people" but also not skewing things in a fashion that causes them unnecessary hardship, which is basically what we currently do.
In other words, the best way to help someone might not be handing them whatever addresses their most immediate problem. Controlling their lives to do things like administer medical treatment might produce better, cheaper, more reliable long-term outcomes. Is that "unnecessary hardship"?
Consider that SF's record of attempting to deliver services in-place to the homeless population has not made much of a dent in the size of the population.
Sigh.
I am not sure if we are on the same page here with what we are trying to communicate. In some sense, you have to put money behind it in order to respect it, but perhaps not in any manner that you are meaning by that comment.
The current state of the U.S. housing situation grows out of the history of the past many decades, going back to at least WWII. During WWII, men went off the war and women got factory jobs, consumer items were rationed and car factories got converted to making military vehicles. You had a lot of de facto two income households with no kids and no means to have a child due to the man being on a different continent from the woman. During WWII, savings rates were as high as 50% during some years, just because there was no means to spend it all. Luxury items simply weren't available and people in the U.S. were being encouraged to grow Victory Gardens so that food grown on farms could be used to supply the military overseas.
The men came back home after WWII and they were entitled to VA benefits, including help buying a home. Practically overnight, the federal government put together the financial infrastructure to help large numbers of returning soldiers buy a house. There weren't enough houses to go around, in part because WWII was preceded by The Great Depression. So America also had to create the housing infrastructure overnight. This resulted in Levittowns going up all over the place, introducing suburbs to the nation.
At that point in time, the average new home was less than 1200 square feet, two bedrooms, one bath and housed a family with two adults and two to three children. By 2000, the average new house was over 2000 square feet and housed a family with two adults and only one child. We have diversified demographically and we now have a lot more elderly retired couples with no kids at home, single parents, and other non-nuclear families while at the same time having a lot fewer housing alternatives in real terms. During The Great Depression, things like SRO's and boarding houses were a lot more common. These days, if you are a single young person with not much of a paycheck, in most parts of the U.S., you wind up renting an apartment designed for a nuclear family and sharing it with roommates because there basically are no other viable alternatives.
This is all rooted in housing policy, which is very tied up in things like tax breaks and financing instruments. If you do not change policy in a way that makes money/financing instruments more accessible to people currently getting ugly labels because of their low income or lack of housing or what not -- because, in short, they fail to be what America wants to believe is some picture of success, as if that were context-neutral, which it very much is not -- then, no, you aren't ACTUALLY respecting people who are currently being screwed over royally by our current system.
Fixing it doesn't mean more government dole programs that control the lives of the recipients. It means altering national policy such that we genuinely need less of that because market solutions are more available to more people. Right now, housing policy and financing instruments tie the hands of a lot of people.
Anyway, I have work to do. I no longer get food stamps and I kind of would like to eat every day this month. So I need to excuse myself from further participating here, at least until I get some paid writing done.
Thank you.
I'm all for programs to actually help people move, and get them support in their new location and etc. But that's not what most people here are talking about.
The solution is surely transitional payments to get people to relocate.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/business/in-climbing-incom...
Full version:
A couple of years ago I had this offer to relocate to Sillicon Valley to work at my company's new office there. H1B visa, great salary, incredible project, a dream come true.
I live in Barcelona and there are few cities in the world which can compete with the Barcelona package, even during times of 'crisis' - great climate, beautiful architecture, laid back lifestyle and great cuisine.
San Francisco was one of those cities and I didn't want to miss the opportunity now that I had it. And Sillicon Valley - it's like coming to the centre of the tech world where history is being forged.
So I came over to explore and see if it makes sense to relocate.
It was my first time visiting the United States and I was so excited !
I had Scott McKenzie playing in my headphones when my train arrived in San Francisco. It was an emotional moment and I almost felt bad that I didn't have a flower in my hair :).
It felt incredible to be there. People were smiling and saying 'Hello', there were techies everywhere and the city looked very nice indeed. I went to Haight Ashbury and then the Golden Gate park, some guy offered me a joint and I just sat there listening to drummers and looking at the great, powerful oak (? pine ?) trees surrounding me.
The air, the drums, the joint put me in a state of trance and I felt as if the city started speaking to me - "Come here, in here there is power, this is the place to be if you want to change the world'. I've felt it's power, I felt it's might, I've felt that it's now or never.
But there was something else in it's tone. A kind of strange arrogance and slight bullying, a kind of 'either you're with me or get the fuck out of here' kind of vibe.
At first I didn't give it much thought when I saw the homeless people - drunks, addicts, ex cons, whatever... But then I started to notice that there's lots of them in the city and as it started to get dark, the streets became filled with these people - fucked up, strange and scary, outcasts, abandoned, ignored, useless... I almost ran back to the train station.
The next days that I stayed there I couldn't help but see homeless and the poor people everywhere and I just couldn't comprehend it.
How is it possible that the place were the greatest fortunes are made is filled with so many poor people ? I mean, I know it's their lives and they're responsible for that... but still ? Why did they get to this state ? Is the society there so 'cruel' that you either make it or fuck off ?
How come there are no homeless (or at least bum-looking) people in Barcelona ?
This contradiction was one of the reasons that I refused the offer to relocate. I can't explain it rationally - rational people don't base their decisions on such ridiculous details - but nevertheless it's been a big factor in my decision.
But there is food for thought there.
That said, I still want to come back to San Francisco and Sillicon Valley, seems like there's so much to explore there. And I know I will, probably soon and maybe then I will be able to understand it better. But for now, it's in my list of mysteries.
SF has a per captia homeless population well above average for the US.
Oddly enough this is very common in bigger US cities, and not just a SV thing
> then I started to notice that there's lots of them in the city and as it started to get dark, the streets became filled with these people - fucked up, strange and scary, outcasts, abandoned, ignored, useless... I almost ran back to the train station
aside from the whole mental hospital dump [1], warmer climates tend to attract homeless for a variety of reasons (e.g., on the street + cold weather = gona have a bad time)
> How come there are no homeless (or at least bum-looking) people in Barcelona ?
that's a very good question
[1]: http://www.salon.com/2013/09/29/ronald_reagans_shameful_lega...