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Finding the Downside In San Francisco's Tech Boom
snydeq writes "The NYTimes reports on the San Francisco's shifting socio-economic landscape thanks to a massive influx of tech workers and tax and regulation breaks to big-name startups. 'In a city often regarded as unfriendly to business, Mayor Edwin M. Lee, elected last year with the tech industry's strong backing, has aggressively courted start-ups. But this boom has also raised fears about the tech industry's growing political clout and its spillover economic effects. Apartment rents have soared to record highs as affordable housing advocates warn that a new wave of gentrification will price middle-class residents out of the city. At risk, many say, are the very qualities that have drawn generations of outsiders here, like the city's diversity and creativity. Families, black residents, artists and others will increasingly be forced across the bridge to Oakland, they warn.'"
That this is also an economic boon for Oakland.
Rich people spending too much money results in inflation at a local level. Film at 11.
So, they're warning that the tech boom in San Francisco could lead to another Full House?
First they complained because of "suburb flight" where affluent persons moved to the suburbs and left-behind a poor base in the city.
Now they are complaining that the affluent people are moving back in.
I wish they'd make up their mind.
Do they want the upper/middle incomes to leave the city, or stay in the city? Either way, it appears they will wine about it.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Shocking
USA Today was reporting on this 5 years ago.....
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-08-26-urban-blacks_N.htm
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
When bankers and other finance capitalists turned Manhattan into their personal playground I don't remember any snotty articles from the NY Times about it. In fact the NY Times is always trying to hype up and promote the tech industry in NYC. Oh no, so artists will have to move to Oakland? I work in design so I guess I'm kind of "artistish" and in NYC everyone has accepted the fact of life that if you want to do art or music you're going to live in Brooklyn. That's just the way it is.
At risk, many say, are the very qualities that have drawn generations of outsiders here, like the city's diversity and creativity. Families, black residents, artists and others will increasingly be forced across the bridge to Oakland, they warn.
Means:
The diversity and creativity formerly accumulated in SF will now spread throughout the SF Bay Area.
Why is this a bad thing?
what this is going to do to the traffic situation around there, especially the Bay and San Mateo bridges if everyone moves to the East Bay.... What a mess.
"Families, black residents, artists and others...."
black residents.. really? Oh, no they didn't
.... the same thing happened in the Dot-Com 1.0 boom and bust cycle - high rents and home prices, scarce commercial real estate (with landlords often kicking tenants out so they could double and triple and quadruple the per square foot price), fresh tech school and college grads getting six figure salaries. It's deja vu all over again. The Facebook IPO bust is a harbinger that the bubble will be popping soon - I'm giving it 12-18 months to the massive mobile/sugar water-related VC investments start completely tanking. Of course rents in SF have ALWAYS been high - tech boom or no tech boom - just like in New York City. It's a global city and attracts many, many people to it annually. Yes there is a historical core of working-class/blue-collar San Franciscans that are getting squeezed out but that trend has been ongoing for nearly 20 years now.
SF has long since been a homogeneous place of wealthy professionals, with a fringe of poor lefties living in the Tenderloin. Blacks have long since moved out of California, often to Atlanta.
California is rich in the real resources that these new start ups need. People, and culture. - No really! It's the place to come if you've got good ideas and the drive to execute them. It's also a great place to live if you enjoy being with people that think that way. (In b4 shitstorm of groupthink California hate-on comments. Sorry guys, get your own ideas.) The facebook movie illustrates this idea very well. They went to California because it's the only place they could find the people, talent, places, and other resources to make their idea work. It's the culture.
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Funny how supposedly business hostile California is home to the most cutting edge, high tech companies in the nation. California is only "hostile to business" if you are in the business courting of govt handouts to corporations or abusing your workers.
So there's no way a successful and educated population can be diverse and creative. Got it. I do like to check in on ideologythink now and again.
Why not report on the apparent boon that's coming Oakland's way, what with the tide of diverse and creative refugee artist families heading their way.
This is an attention-whore article if ever there was one.. San Francisco is a *crazy* city, always has been. Make it or don't, no social engineering will change that
If you make X more desirable, you will likewise make X more valuable. It doesn't much matter what X is as long as X is a finite resource. Whether it's a boom town in North Dakota with rents in the thousands of dollars per month or San Francisco is completely moot. Demand increases value, value increases cost, cost decreases affordability.
Why, oh why, are people surprised by this? This was old news in the times or the ancient Romans. To put it simply, this economics 101, supply and demand in action. Next big surprise story, Chinese factories have long hours for little wages, yet still turn down 10 applications for every job?
we like oakland better anyhow you white zombeez!
where there is tech. NYC, Boston, even Portland, Oregon,..
it takes years to get any large structure built and while you read about politicians and community activist bemoaning the lack of affordable housing you never see real progress. Instead you get locals doing the classic NIMBY maneuver. Oh its fine and dandy if you build it OVER THERE!... which of course the over there crowd don't want it either. Lots of lip service and little action, the point being that the type of construction needed for truly affordable and sustainable housing is not the type that occurs.
then there is the whole concept of what affordable housing really means.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
So what? Why not just let economies run their course?
...I work in design so I guess I'm kind of "artistish" and in NYC everyone has accepted the fact of life that if you want to do art or music you're going to live in Brooklyn. That's just the way it is.
Er, accepted it as a "fact of life"? I guess I'm not following you there, as a truly gifted artist could "do" art or music anywhere in the world.
However, only the successful artists are able to choose where they live, but that does for damn near any profession.
I think it just makes for a nice conversation piece - intriguing news, at that, honestly. Certainly, an economic change in any area may serve to create some related cultural shifts, in that area and surrounding areas. Whether in the abstract, or in any more pragmatic details, why should we be so concerned about it, at that?
Do we want the city to stop developing a stronger technological entrepreneurship base? Probably not the best of goals.
Do we want real estate agents to stop increasing prices, if that trend continues? "Good luck with that."
Or do we simply not want to replace all the struggling artists with entrepreneurs? Is that the expected outcome? Maybe some of those new businesses will support the local arts communities - "problem solved," lol.
I'm certain that the city of San Francisco, and of her neighboring metropolitan areas, can constructively adapt to such change, in however it goes.
...because of high taxation and land use regulation, the NYT would be defending it.
This has already been happening for quite a while, and among friends who live in the area, San Francisco has already developed a reputation as being a sort of fortress of elite upper middle income people. The city's demographic, according to friends, is most favorable to mid-career types in their late twenties and early thirties: people who have already established their careers and have the money to afford the skyrocketing cost of living in the city but at the same time do not need space for raising children. Lower-middle incomes, poor people and families are being replaced by yuppies. You see similar trends in major cities across the United States, New York, Washington DC, etc., but San Francisco is noteworthy because of the sheer amounts of money being thrown around thanks to the new tech boom.
Fact of the matter is the whole freaking area is WAY overdue for a huge earthquake of the proportions that crashed and burned the city at the start of the 20th century. Until that occurs I have to wonder about putting my family in danger.
Sure, there is danger everywhere but ask any Geologist about the chances of a major earthquake in San Francisco and it's definitely not trivial.
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/regional/nca/ucerf/
It's more laid back and the Berkeley/Oakland hills are backed up by thousands of acres of parks and undeveloped reservoir land. Plus both the views and the weather are better. And you can get into the city in a matter of minutes plus have a shorter drive to Tahoe and Yosemite.
Gifted and commercially successful aren't the same thing, nice try though.
Facebook is in Palo Alto and Menlo Park, people. This is talking about San Francisco, not exactly the same thing.
Wayne Cooksey joined the flight of African-Americans from this city last year to escape soaring rents and buy a home. Michael Higgenbotham left six years ago for a safer neighborhood and better schools for his three children.
One guy bought a home, and the other guy found a better school? Sounds to me like people are moving up in the world! These are two success stories.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Except throughout history they often are. The Sistine chapel wasn't painted for free.
I'll advocate Pittsburgh, our population has declined since the steel industry collapse. But what does that mean for your job opportunities?... Ohh, he said Economics, I thought he said beat the homeless.
I grew up in Cupertino, which when I grew up in the early 80s had the diversity of being white and hispanic. Now if you compare my elementary school class photos of those of the current children, you'll see the diversity is now illustrated by Indian and Chinese.
Same homes. Just now these people pay over $1m for the 1400sq ft house I grew up in.
Diversity is all about which races you need to have to be diverse. Can you be diverse without any african americans? Is it more diverse to have only Indian/Chinese vs. White/Mexican? Btw, in certain schools in Cupertino and parts of Sunnyvale, being white is a minority.
Accept the times, or move.
Same thing is happening in Manhattan NYC -- Only the very wealthy can afford to live there, so what you end up with is the rich lawyers, wall-street people and the like, and the dirt-poor, homeless types -- and everyone else has to commute in.
I mean really, if you ever want a photograph of the divide between the haves and have-nots, just start clicking away just about anywhere in NYC on an average day, and you'll see a multi-millionaire walking past a homeless dude.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
It feels weird to cite articles from USA Today that are from 5 yrs ago.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Which is worse: hobos or hipsters?
...these are the main downside, with a side order of offentimes.
"Overspecialize, and you breed in weakness." - Major Motoko Kusanagi
This situation probably sounds like something somewhere on the scale from no big deal to f'in great if you are a 20-30 something temporarily occupying that space between overpaying employer and overcharging rentier.
Meanwhile, cities can not sustain themselves on these kind of demographic patterns. Cities need all kinds of people working at all income levels to work efficiently. Banishing the working poor to the hinterlands drives up costs (commuting). It also perverts the perspectives of those living on either side of the tracks, where the motivations and plights of each other become alien, leading to misunderstanding and unnecessary tensions.
Sooner or later, these booms become busts or the underlying social structure collapses, leaving dysfunction.
What I want to know is how an industry that constantly sells itself on easy communication and reduced operational friction continues to centralize itself in a way that drives up its own costs of living and makes it physically vulnerable.
Yep. Our housing finance system forces the middle class portfolio to be overweighted towards leveraged real estate. If you were constructing a portfolio with liquid assets, no manager in his right mind would recommend: 75% REITs bought on margin, 25% other things. Yet that's where a lot of people are except that it's an illiquid asset instead of a REIT.
Until this situation changes, nobody will really want affordable housing despite what they say.
Affordable housing means falling prices, and the whole system is designed so that falling prices are bad. That's why "affordable housing" requires you to earn the poverty badge. A world where section 8 vouchers provided $100 of your $120/mo rent instead of $800 of your $900 rent would work just as well, if not better for the government. It's the trannsition that's a bitch. We missed a golden opportunity with this crisis. The rallying cry should be "START FORECLOSURES". Yes, "owners" would have to move; but if we let the blood run in the housing market, they'd move into a place where the rent was 25% of the mortgage. They could put the other 75% in CDs earning 8% interest instead of paying it to the banks.
Maybe some day the bank/housing cartel really will collapse. I certainly won't mourn its loss; but for now it continues to be propped up.
So the New York Times is complaining that San Francisco rents are too high. Why don't they do an article on how the influx of finance industry professionals are pushing the middle class out of New York? Oh wait, that happened 50 years ago.
Everyone in SF gets to have their say over new building developments (witness the nastiness over 8 Washington http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/11/18/BAHR1M13A6.DTL), so virtually nothing gets built, which acts to ensure housing prices stay sky high.
Rather than complain about Yuppies, why not support the construction of more housing units, so that supply meets demand and prices come down? And don't give me any crap about low income housing versus market rate units. If you build enough market rate units to meet the massive pent-up demand, then housing will become more affordable for everyone.
No huge budget deficit, ultra conservative politicians, low cost of living, low taxes, low regulation, educated workforce, etc.
If my idea turns into a .com startup I am going there. I can't afford a $700,000 studio apartment for myself, let alone my workers which I can't pay much yet. Last time I looked you could get studio condo in Austin for $90,000. Taxes are lower and I do not have to give out health benefits to my employees.
I know the last line sounded greedy, but when you only have $200,000 in capital you can't waste it. Shoot even if you hire someone for $35,000 a year you spend $30,000 in health benefits! California requires anyone working more than 19 hours a week health insurance. That is just too much money.
Also I do not feel bad paying people $35,000 a year as a college student in UT @ Austin will be thrilled and can make a decent living and not move back in with Mom and Dad for that price.
Seriously California is so business unfriendly I just do not see any point at all doing business there unless you already setup shop years ago.
http://saveie6.com/
If you can't pretend to be a victim, you are not welcome as a participant in "diversity".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Reading some of the early comments, it seems like people are acting like this just affects artists or poor black people or that this is somehow a reversal of white flight (largely a middle-class phenomenon).
I grew up in San Francisco and still live in the Bay Area. Middle-class and even many (by national standards) upper-middle class people have been and continue to be pushed out of the city. It's not really about racial diversity either. It's a socio-economic and cultural thing. It's also an age thing. To me the quintessential San Francisco resident is a yuppy transplant female in her late 20s or early 30s . She works in tech marketing. She's a foodie and loves visiting all the trendy new brunch places and maybe hitting up a street fair afterwards. She could be white, Asian, hispanic or something else. That doesn't mean it's not monotonous and homogenous. It is homogenous and that's what people are complaining about. And if you want to have a family in San Francisco, you need to be downright wealthy. So there's nothing wrong with being a young professional in itself, but when that's all a city has it's lost a lot of its character.
Anyway, such is life in a market economy. I don't know if there's a right or wrong here and a city like San Francisco has seen waves of demographic changes. But don't think this is like people complaining if white people were to return to inner-city Detroit. This is nothing like that. This is really an entire city becoming like the wealthier parts of Manhattan. I don't expect people from other cities to care, but as a San Francisco native I wish Silicon Valley had been a place in Washington state.
Can anyone explain why "black residents" in particular would have to move to Oakland? Is high-tech threatening to the high levels of melanin?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Bad Now? Just wait 300 years! Apartments are going to be a B*I*T*C*H when Star Fleet United Federation of Planets moves into Sausalito.
I live in what the coastal people call a "fly-over state."
I do not want to raise a family in California any more than I'd want to in NYC. It is a personal preference.
As a former rocket scientist with highly sought after web dev and other skills, both MS and Google headhunters have contacted me. Other very large American enterprises have as well.
I am willing to move, but I am unwilling to move anywhere on the western coast or to the northeastern USA. Why?
* Taxation.
* Quality of life.
* Power policies.
* Fresh Water.
* Politics.
* True monetary value of pay.
Given, these are each perceived problems as an outsider, I could be completely wrong. However, I have lived in 9 different states and visited all but 5 states for long-term stays. I've also traveled across Europe, Asia, Central and South America. My take home pay isn't much by SF or NYC standards, but we have a huge house, multiple acres of land and neighbors who call before they show up. It is a nice place to live. A major international airport is 45 minutes away with direct flights to most every continents and the local "big city" has world class universities and culture.
This is not Nebraska - BTW I lived there for 8 yrs - and I'd move back over SF or NYC any day. Warren Buffet isn't stupid.
I love visiting those coastal places. They are fantastic and most of the people are nice enough, but ... something just doesn't fit.
I'll call it arrogance; they think everyone else is stupid for not wanting to live there. I don't want my kids learning that. There are fantastic people all around the world, including in NYC and SF/Cali, but there are definitely great people in the "fly-over states" too.
My state has a balanced budget every year, not a $16B deficit.
We haven't had a power outage here longer than 5 minutes in about 15 yrs. Sure, some places loose power for a few hours after major storms, but nothing with brown-outs or months of not having power. I looked up where my power comes from - 4 nuclear power plants within 250 miles, none within 100 miles. Go nukes!
"housing advocates warn that a new wave of gentrification will price middle-class residents out of the city"
San Francisco and "middle-class" are mutually exclusive. SF hasn't had any middle-class residents since at least the mid-90's. To be middle-class in SF/BA would be considered almost upper class in most of the rest of the U.S.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Last time I looked at buying SF property potentially to rent out I was scared off by the regulations the city imposes on landlords. How can anyone sleep at night knowing your tenants are more in control than you are? I'm going to bet I'm not the only one with this impression, which would mean given a choice individual owners will sell long before they'll risk getting into the 'affordable rent' game. Same dynamic may be why the developments are condos, not rentals.
So why no mention of the city's propensity to make being a landlord miserable?
Does it hurt to hear them lying? Was this the only world you had?
Problem with doing that is that you wipe out the imaginary nest egg that millions of baby boomers have in their housing values to rely on for retirement now, rather than later. And that's an awful lot of people in their 50's and 60's to bankrupt and/or force retention in the job market long past their prime. Not to mention clog up social movement/career advancement for the younger generations. There simply is no good answer.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
My dads side of the family were SF natives going to to the 49ers. None of them live there now. The last one left about 15 years ago. Transplant is right, almost no one who lives there now is from SF, let alone the BA or even California.
Your analysis of the homogeneity of SF are spot on.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
I guess I'm not following you there, as a truly gifted artist could "do" art or music anywhere in the world.
There are bums who could tear Eric Clapton to shreds. Giftedness is a tiny factor in the equation.
Neither was my apartment. I am not seeing the correlation here...
Everyone involved will die of AIDS.
S.F. is schizophrenic in many ways. It is incredibly diverse in many ways. You have the far left fighting the far far left who are fighting the far sideways left. Tiny enclaves exist in what is essentially a small city. You have hipsters and foodies and all variety of pretentiousness moving there for the urban vibe who then avoid the authentic urban decay a couple blocks away. People will live there and commute an hour away rather than be uncool and live outside the city. The economic base is very weak, it is mostly a residential community with a few financial centers who employee people from out of town, and tourism which really keeps things going. It has areas with desparate poverty and areas with promiscuous affluence. Rent control almost nullfiies the possibility of bringing in new affordable housing. As soon as an area manages to get a little bit cleaned up it is overrun with high priced eateries or dance clubs.
It is an inwardly looking enclave. That's why the problems it has are San Francisco problems and not Bay Area problems. Elsewhere the borders between cities are crossed without even blinking, but the border with S.F. is like a wall.
Obviously.
I think you're overreacting. He left out a propositional phrase that would make it explicit. He means that if you want to do art or music in New York then Brooklyn is the best you can afford.
There was a tech bubble for about two years, and it ended literally between yesterday and today. NOW you report on it!
My own two cents, but I've been living in Oakland for 20 years, and never had one urge to move to SF. Oakland has much better weather, amazing parks (10 minute drive from my house and I'm in a redwood forest), and now that it's mathematically impossible to start new clubs, bars, or restaurants in SF they are all moving here!
I get why people have skewed ideas about Oakland (the media, the closet and overt racism) but I tell them: It's a great place to live, but you wouldn't want to visit there.
Transplant is right, almost no one who lives there now is from SF, let alone the BA or even California.
Listen to you.
I grew up in Monterey, lived outside California for 17 years, and returned. I'm not a transplant but a returned native. The dozens of other people I've met who were born and raised, right here, in SF are not transplants either.
You've gotta be lying or deluded to say SF is homogeneous. I've been to Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Kansas, Missouri, and more. Many of those places are homogeneous or dichotomous (e.g. blacks and whites).
Just because your family no longer lives in SF doesn't mean everyone in SF hails from outlands, as if that were a bad thing in and of itself.
"like" a wall? You mean that huge expanse of water known as the bay?
At risk, many say, are the very qualities that have drawn generations of outsiders here, like the city's diversity and creativity. Families, black residents, artists and others will increasingly be forced across the bridge to Oakland, they warn.'"
So, what they are saying is that Oakland will become the new San Francisco with all the quirky goodness and diversity. Oakland will benefit economically and socially from the influx of diverse, creative people. It will become a tourist destination, jobs will come, property values will rise, etc.
And, San Francisco will become a tech hub the residents of which will go to Oakland to experience what once was in San Francisco.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
No real difference between SF and anywhere else. Influx of affluent people will force the less affluent away. Same old story since the beginning of time.
Certainly the way that it worked in Aspen and Boulder.
Lots of accuracy in the parent post. San Francisco is small, and so close to Silicon Valley's "silly money" that it's very, very difficult to manage here on a modest middle income. A lot of what made this city so interesting has begun to fade away. There is far, far less socioeconomic diversity, too. There is a lot of cultural diversity, but it's all from the same upper-middle class group. The sheer beauty of the place is compelling, and people *consciously* pay more than they would across the Bay because of that, as well as the perceived "cultural" advantages (which are mostly over-priced - try buying an opera ticket for $400). Look at the cost of a ticket to a Giants game. Ridiculous. I see almost the entirety of San Francisco becoming like a large Upper East Side, in NYC, with "average" folks migrating to Oakland, or elsewhere. Actually, this may be a boon for Oakland; there's nothing like people with knowledge (and through knowledge, power) to cause a shift in the way things are run, in Oakland (one of the most dysfunctional cities, anywhere). All of this will take a decade ot two, but it will happen. San Francisco will continue to be "that gleaming city bu the Bay", but will be FAR less interesting than it is today, or was even 20 years ago.
What a one-sided load of excrement this article is. Do the authors not want San Francisco (a city that has never had cheap rents in my experience) to not be successful?
And why is it that (note the clever playing of the race card) that only potentially displaced residents are the ones with creative or artistic value? Do these new people moving in have nothing at all to offer the city? I'm sure that they do.
Cities grow, shrink, and change over time. And how hard is it really to live in Oakland and participate in San Francisco when the two cities are only a short BART ride under the bay?
I mean really, what a waste of bandwidth this whiny article is.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I guess I'm not following you there, as a truly gifted artist could "do" art or music anywhere in the world.
There are bums who could tear Eric Clapton to shreds.
Indeed there are
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Rent control almost nullfiies the possibility of bringing in new affordable housing.
you are perpetuating a myth of rent control in SF having an impact on new housing construction.
From the San Francisco Rent Ordinance:
San Francisco's rent control law covers most rental property in San Francisco. If you live in San Francisco, you are covered by rent control unless you fall into one of these major exceptions:
1. You live in a building constructed after June of 1979. This "new construction exemption" is the biggest exemption in SF and can not be changed
Therefore, any new construction can be rented at market rates and reassessed with only 60 days notice to the existing renters at any point.
There may be many reasons san francisco doesn't have new affordable housing, lack of space, construction permit process, etc, but rent control isn't one of them.
I moved to San Francisco in 1999, during the last tech boom.
In 2000, the anti-gentrification talk really picked up steam. "Dotcommers" were raising the cost of of living, driving people out of affordable neighborhoods. And yes, Oakland was a common destination for people and businesses who could no long afford San Francisco. Someone painted "DIE YUPPIE SCUM" on the sidewalk in my neighborhood. Fliers were posted decrying the whitening of the Mission district.
A friend asked if I thought there was a solution to the gentrification problem. I told him, "Wait a year."
It's a bubble, it'll pop eventually. When people start complaining about too much money coming into the city, you know something's gone awry.
As a tech guy living in Sunnyvale on a middle-class income ($90k), I never ever had any desire to live in SF. At this point, it's a city for the rich. Someone on a middling income like mine would have to either throw away a disproportionate amount of money on housing, or settle for living in really shitty areas. Nor am I too excited about living in a 'nice' area that just happens to be within a reasonable walking distance of the ghetto. And if you happen to drive a nice car, good luck finding a place with a garage - I've heard way too many stories of people having their cars broken into in SF.
Here in S'vale, I live in an 1bd 550sq ft. apartment in a decent area, with an assigned covered parking, onside laundry, and plenty of stuff to do within a 15 minute driving distance for all of $1050/month. I don't even want to think how much it would cost in SF for only similar quality of life. As far as I am concerned, the hobos and the rich can have their 7x7 all to themselves.
It is connected by land and bridges and ferries to other areas.
Nope, they build projects all over San Francisco, so we all get a share of the low income housing. You can walk two blocks from $800K-1M house to low-income projects in various parts of the City like Potrero Hill, Bernal/Alemany projects, etc.
As a single guy, yeah it's great. Who cares if I am blowing too much money on rent, and not sutffing my 401k...I'm 20-something and just having a good time.
Now fast-forward nine years....now as a property owner (!), landlord (!!), and father (!!!) things of course are way different. City is still great. Got the best of many things (ocean, sailing the bay, skiing is close, urban atmosphere, bike and walk everywhere, hiking, wine country..not shabby).
But the one thing SF can't handle are children. When my daughter gets older we'll have to make some real decisions about stay or leave. Schools absolutey suck and you can't count on 20-somethings (my former self included) to give a crap about the schools and vote some serious people in.
Yes, and last time I checked, even with bridges and ferries, people are generally disinclined to build directly on open water; and to the south, there are the San Bruno Mountains, Lake Merced, and Daly City (which is the only corridor out of the city). So yes, in other words, ~90% of the city's perimeter is a "wall."
They are a New York paper complaining about a competing city getting all the high tech startups and therefore venture capital now that Wall Street has basically self-destructed the New York financial markets. Meanwhile the same paper is reporting that the jobs ax is going to fall again on the banking sector as upper level management throws middle management overboard in order to save their own bonuses: http://news.yahoo.com/wall-st-few-places-hide-jobs-ax-hovers-220146813--sector.html
About the only thing that needs changing about San Francisco (and California, in general) is to not have Prop 13 apply to non-residential commercial properties. There would be a quick rebalancing in what gets built.
-- Terry
I lived in the Bay Area from 1995 to 2004.
I read the exact same editorial, with a few proper nouns changed, on average, every 2-3 months.
So, given that...
Either:
a)It's already happened, since people started shrieking it was going to happen at least as far back as 1995, and probably sooner. Get over it.
b)It's never going to happen, because if it hasn't happened since 1995, it never will. Get over it.
Could you be any more vague? Which jobs?
kthxbye...
There is no way a "Diverse" (lots of Black and Hispanic people) city can be prosperous and creative. Why? Because Blacks and Hispanics lack the ability (for whatever reason, DNA/Genetics or Culture) to do the things that create wealth and innovation. About 48% of Detroit (90% Black) adults are illiterate. No Silicon Valley firm, or Bio-Tech firm, or any cutting edge aerospace firm (like say Elon Musk's outfit) recruits at Historically Black Universities and Colleges, or predominantly Hispanic colleges and universities. Whites, Chinese, Japanese, and upper caste Indians are where the talent is at. Just like Basketball and Football, invented by Whites, are dominated by Blacks because of talent, so too is engineering, technology in general, visual arts, classical music, and literature a nearly all White/Asian duopoly, with minor keys played by high caste Indians.
This is reality, no one has ever been able to sprinkle "magic dust" to make people smarter, or love reading, or more cooperative, when the population at large lacks those things, anymore than a magic formula has been found to make Whites competitive in say, the Men's Olympic 100 Meter sprint (top 100 time holders are ALL West African descended men). Different is not equal to better or worse, there is no super-race.
But if you want fast athletes, or strong/quick ones, you will be looking at mostly but not exclusively West African ones. A few guys like Yao Ming and 2011 NBA Finals MVP Dirk Nowitzki notwithstanding. The same is true for technology and innovation: you are looking at almost exclusively a White/Asian phenomena. Its hard to innovate when you can't even read.
High IQ and high earning White people don't want to live, PC hype to the contrary, among Blacks and Hispanics. Any more than they want their kids going to school with them or around them (due to the high incidence of violence and anti-White, anti-Asian violence among Blacks and to a lesser extent Hispanics). People pay top dollar to live in San Francisco BECAUSE Blacks have been priced out, and avoid Oakland BECAUSE its filled with the hyper-violent Black underclass, Nation of Islam, and other undesirables. In Detroit this year a nine month old Black baby boy was shot in his own home after a fight over seating at a Baby Shower led to a drive by shooting. Middle and Upper class people will not put up with that. Hypocritical lip service might abound, but the White/Asian/High Caste Indian technology workers are secretly overjoyed that Blacks and Hispanics are being priced out. Safer and nicer for them. No one wants to live next to a Trayvon Martin.
There is no boom coming Oakland's way. Its endemic poverty, corruption, and violence, itself a function of the large amounts of underclass, illiterate, single-motherhood-dominated (thus poverty guaranteeing population, two parents being a safety net against poverty) Black population makes it about as attractive as Detroit, or Cleveland, or Southside Chicago, or Gary Indiana.
Call this "racist" or whatever. It is the sad truth. I wish it were not this way. If it were not, real estate would be cheaper. Wealth production and innovation less dependent on a declining White population base (with some Asian/Indian people). But there it it is. And no, there is no superior race. But the distribution of traits like IQ, cooperation, dutifulness, are not even, because evolution affects human populations as well.
Wait, what planet are you living on where you can get 8% interest in CDs? Can I join you?
But of course, nobody on the right. You have to have *some* standards!
The irony about a new york magazine complaining about rent in another city amuses me.
"Real artists ship."