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Protesters Block Apple and Google Buses In California
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Business Insider reports that protesters have stopped a bus filled with Apple employees in San Francisco and a Google bus in Oakland. Tech companies like Google, Apple, and Facebook provide free buses that take their employees from San Francisco to their headquarters in the suburbs. Protesters are mad at the tech companies because the wealthy tech employees have driven up the price of housing in San Francisco, which is pricing out some people. The buses also use public transit stops, and some protesters think that's wrong. Between 70 and 100 protesters gathered for the blockade of Apple private tech shuttle to protest evictions in the city of San Francisco. The activists in San Francisco were from Eviction Free San Francisco, Our Mission No Eviction, Causa Justa /Just Cause. Protesters stood in front of a white shuttle bus holding banners and signs. Some peeked through cardboard signs fashioned in the shape of place markers on Google maps, with "Evicted" written across the front. Meanwhile violence occurred in Oakland, according to reports from IndyBay, as protesters unfurled two giant banners reading "TECHIES: Your World Is Not Welcome Here" and "Fuck off Google" and "a person appeared from behind the bus and quickly smashed the whole of the rear window, making glass rain down on the street. Cold air blew inside the bus and the blockaders with their banners departed." Two weeks ago, protesters stopped a Google bus."
This just in: The homeless and unemployed mobbed a bus full of people perceived to be rich, perhaps unaware of the 60-80 hour work weeks endured by software engineers, that once you take that into consideration, many in the industry make at, or less, than minimum wage.
-_- Guys... if you're gonna have a protest against the rich, go pitch a tent on the CEO's lawn, not in the middle of the street where a bunch of people only doing slightly better than you are take the bus to work every day. Not only will you win an Irony award from me, but you'll get arrested for obstructing traffic too -- and rightfully so. Time and place. First two things you learn in activism. Time. Place. Learn it.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I hate to make it sound like I'm pissing on the protesters, but how is it the fault of techies that house pricing is going up?
Goodbye Slashdot. You've changed.
The tech industry is not responsible for driving up housing prices. The greed of people who set housing prices is responsible for driving up housing prices. However, it is much harder to visibly protest the upscale equivalent of a slumlord (I guess still a slumlord), especially when such highly visible symptoms as environmentally friendly commuter buses are within easy reach.
They want them to move away from San Fran, so that the whole place will become a slum that they can afford to live in.
Either that or they want to force them all to buy cars, producing more gridlock, more pollution, and more wear & tear on the roads.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
There is an ever widen inequality gap in America. Gaps in wealth, income, education, access to healthcare, life expectancy, etc. Much attention has been paid to the life of the top 1% but not so much to the bottom 20%. Real incomes for them have stagnated or gone down over the last decade. The urine poor public education system gives little opportunity for upward mobility. Hunger, cold, and loss of housing are constant worries.
Meanwhile in congress, politicians want to cut social welfare programs, keep taxes on the wealthy at record low rates, give tax breaks for corporate jets, cut unemployment benefits, send the poor to fight stupid wars (how many of the Apple and Google employees have friends and family serving in the Middle East?). The list goes on and on. I am fighting the urge to blame this all on the Republicans because the Democrats don't really seem to want to fix the problem.
So the situation has devolved into this-- where the poor, disaffected, resentful masses with little hope of improving their lot see the gleaming buses give free rides to the Apple and Google employees with their free lunches. To be fair to the employees in the buses, they are probably not the really rich because they have onsite parking. First the spray cans. Next the torches, rocks and sickles. Meanwhile the politicians in Washington cry "Let them eat cake."
Exactly what is wrong with "gentrification"? One commenter on the linked article on IndyBay points out the City of Detroit as an example of what happens when the middle class leaves. Is that what they want for Oakland?
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
As I recall, housing prices in SF and environs were going astronomical long before Google existed. And seeing as Apple's been there since the 70's, it seems rather odd that "just recently" Apple is responsible for a price rise in housing.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
We are starting to see the social unrest caused by the wealth disparity in the US - a disparity of Third World proportions. You have people being left begind in the economic prosperity and to add insult to injury, they are then told it's because of their character: unwillingness to work hard, poor money skills, getting the wrong education or degree. (It's funny, back in the 90s, all those tech people were saying "follow you passions! That's how you make it big!" and "We only hire people who are passionate about what they do!")
The techies were just the first targets. Don't worry, the CEOs will come next - if they can get through shareholder paid for armed security. Security for big shots is a BOOMING business, btw.
This is what happens when people feel like there's no hope for them to better their lives. They see that "work hard" means nothing when you have assholes who know the right people become billionaires with little or no effort - they just had the contacts to folks who knew how to set it up to sucker investors with an IPO.
It's starting to happen folks! Social issues like this were solved in the 30s but we went BACKWARDs in the last couple of decades.
We need 1950s income tax rates back; which was the most prosperous times in US history. Back then working hard and having "good" character got you some where.
"I'd rather have to give half away than have all if it taken away!"
-Joseph P. Kennedy.
The disparity in the US is huge, yes, but being poor in the US is a picnic compared to the third world. No one in the US needs to starve. You have a roof over your head. You have at least some money for luxuries like a mobile phone and a TV. Comparing this to third world poverty shows that you've never been to the third world.
That is false and you have absoutely no clue. See the chart. We are on the level of some African countries - and some of those Third World shitholes are actually better than we are.
The rest of that statement show someone who has a very very cloistered life.
Taking too many company buses and living on the company "campus" are we?
They are idiots, pure and simple.
That's what I think of all the SF tech companies. They are all just advertising companies with a delusion of being innovative.
Despite all the complaints about a lack of housing, SV hasn't become more urbanized. Is there any reason for that other than zoning and other government imposed limits? If SV companies really wanted more housing in the area, they'd pressure the local governments to change that. It's absurd to complain about lack of housing when you don't see 10 story apartment buildings everywhere.
In most parts of the country, cities lament that people LIVE in the suburbs, and only WORK in the city, robbing them of the property taxes they need to support the crumbling social and economic infrastructure, causing a collapse in property values (Detroit is a perfect example, but other large cities have the same issues).
In California, when people make an effort to LIVE in the city, paying all those higher taxes and propping up all that social and economic infrastructure, they're protested for harming the poor by keeping the property values from collapsing.
Face facts, people - you can't have it both ways. If you don't want those middle-income people keeping your neighborhoods from turning into crack houses, you shouldn't complain when the landlords don't have to put up with any deadbeat who feels like squatting in their buildings.
with modest jobs (think service sector, utility technician, etc.) until recently. The cost of living in SF is rising quite rapidly, correlated with the increase in value of firms like Facebook, Twitter and others. Especially correlated with such companies' appearances on the public stock exchanges, which gives their employees a lot of purchasing power, which escalates the prices of housing, property tax rates, rents and so forth.
"Ordinary" jobs (jobs with compensation not de facto indexed to the rise of technology company valuations) don't keep up with increases in local costs of living in areas like SF or San Jose. This hits pretty hard on somebody, for example, like a service tech at a sewage processing plant. That's a moderately skilled job, one that provides real value to the community. Somebody who has filled that job well for 20 years, and who has been able to live in SF on their earnings, quite suddenly finds themselves being priced out of their community. How? Escalating property taxes (based on escalating home prices driven by demand from ISO-enriched techies); increased rents (same reason + others), increased prices of goods and services, etc. After 20 years, they find they can't keep up. Suddenly, living in SF is a "luxury".
All they did was do a good, useful job, maybe raise a family, contribute to making a good community - in short, all the stuff we'd like Americans to do - and they're priced out through no fault of theirs. It's a problem for them, and it's a problem for all of us. It doesn't seem like a problem to those who are on the techie compensation skyrocket, but it is. They just won't notice the damage as soon as others around them.
This just in: The homeless and unemployed mobbed a bus full of people perceived to be rich, perhaps unaware of the 60-80 hour work weeks endured by software engineers, that once you take that into consideration, many in the industry make at, or less, than minimum wage.
The *entry level* salaries for Google and Apple engineers in Silicon Valley is $105K. That's over fifty bucks an hour assuming a 40-hour work week.
Now assume an 80-hour work week, so it's still over 25 bucks an hour. And these engineers get *lots* of perks, including high end health care plans and free transportation to work. Bear in mind that a substantial chunk of a working class salary is spent taking care of these kinds of expenses, and there are lots of non-monetary hassles associated with maintaining a car in a big city.
It's a lot more mundane than that: supply and demand.
When a place becomes desirable over a long period of time, lots of people want to move there. How cities manage this relatively good problem to have is very telling about the character of their politics.
San Francisco decided a long time ago that it didn't want very much new construction. Their land-use restrictions are among the most restrictive in the country, and even if you can get past them, the amount of red tape to either build something or renovate something (particularly if anybody thinks it has historical character, which is not a high bar in SF) combined with the frequency and ease of anti-development lawsuits means that the city has been encouraging people to come to town while adamantly refusing to find anywhere to put them.
This is the inevitable result of a certain kind of liberal mindset: the same people who are in the streets and protesting the lack of affordable housing are the ones who will file lawsuits and protest development that provides housing. It may not be the housing they like, but the thing about the housing market is that you have to have somewhere to put everybody. SF is like New York in this respect: the high end is fine, even if it costs a lot more to be rich in SF than most anywhere else in the United States. The low end, while hardly fine, is served through affordable housing: if you are willing to survive the Waiting Lists of Housing Limbo, you can qualify for a place to live, so long as you never make too much money. Politicians love this stuff because it lets them point at families that could never live in a place like that and take credit for solving the problem that they are making a lot worse, because there is no longer a middle to the housing market.
This problem isn't inherent to government-subsidized housing - you could figure out how to build and/or subsidize low-cost housing without completely distorting the market. But combine it with land-use restrictions and your average San Francsican's general unwillingness to tolerate tract homes and voila, nobody can afford to live there. Blaming Google and Facebook for this is not only ignorant, it's the worst kind of envy: you have what we want, so you must be responsible for the fact that we haven't got it.
Austin has experienced a similar boom to SF and some of the same problems, but even though we've failed on the infrastructure side, we didn't limit development to anywhere near the extent that SF has. Consequently, Austin is still the most expensive place to live in Texas, but the average cost per square foot is between 1/3 and 1/4 of what it is in San Francisco.
TL;DR: If you want everyone to have a place to live, you have to be OK with the fact that they won't all live in charming bungalows or 19th century restoration hardware displays. Anyone who thinks that getting rid of the tech sector in San Francisco is a solution should go visit Detroit to see what a city looks like when business leaves. Just don't call the cops or the fire department unless you have an hour to kill.
I have lived in the SF Bay Area almost my entire life. In this area, every single time anyone tries to build new urban housing, the left shows up and protests. Are you trying to build a new condo building? PROTEST. Trying to build new apartments? PROTEST. The political left has fought, tooth and nail, for decades, to restrict severely, or even to reduce the supply of housing in the SF Bay Area, and ESPECIALLY urban housing like high-rise apartment buildings. Then, the consequences of their actions occurred: the price of real estate went up, especially for renters.
When the price of real estate started going up, because of absolutely restricted supply, the left started rebelling against the consequences of its own actions. They started protesting again--not against themselves who actually caused the phenomenon, but against Google, who had nothing to do with it. Now the left has people holding banners saying "FUCK GOOGLE" and "Techies not welcome here".
Of course, if the protestors really succeeded in "fucking Google" etc, and tech companies were really not welcome here, then silicon valley would have to move somewhere else. Then the tech industry which supports this entire area (like GM used to support Detroit) would vacate, and the tax base would implode, and San Francisco would increasingly resemble Detroit--not at first, of course, but gradually over decades. Then the left would protest the consequences of their own actions, once again. "FUCK GOOGLE FOR LEAVING", "FUCK TAX RECEIPTS FOR GOING DOWN" and so on. Perhaps they would demand that tech companies and workers continue to pay local taxes despite not working or living here anymore.
I find it ironic that one of the protesting organizations is called "just cause". Because "just cause" is what was already happening. People are getting what they DESERVE--unaffordable real estate--which is what they caused by their own actions. That is what "just" means, or used to mean.
Frankly, I think it should be easier to evict renters. If they do not allow the construction of new housing units, and they have never bought a house, then they should have nowhere to live. They have only themselves to blame.
Dear Google and Apple,
I saw on the news that local residents hate you now and are preventing your workers from arriving to work on time. Please move your operations to our state and we will show how much we appreciate all your paid employees spending their money in our neighborhoods.
Sincerely,
The 49 other saner states.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...