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Google Funds San Francisco Bus Rides For Poor
theodp writes "The LA Times reports that Google will fund free bus passes for low- and middle-income kids in a move to quiet the controversy surrounding tech-driven gentrification in San Francisco. In a statement, Google said, 'San Francisco residents are rightly frustrated that we don't pay more to use city bus stops. So we'll continue to work with the city on these fees, and in the meantime will fund MUNI passes for low income students [an existing program] for the next two years.' SF Mayor Ed Lee said, 'I want to thank Google for this enormous gift to the SFMTA, and I look forward to continuing to work with this great San Francisco employer towards improving our City for everyone.' But not all were impressed. 'It's a last-minute PR move on their part, and they're trying to use youth unfairly to create a better brand image in the city,' said Erin McElroy of the SF Anti-Eviction Mapping Project."
The land of the Free.
But not so free as to be able to pick up passengers while stopped on a public road.
For that you need papers and baksheesh.
Now that google is laying high speed fibre networks, why not let the employees telecommute over their Gbps links ? That solves the problem of them crowding public transport and the etc .
..a walk on part in the war .. for a lead role in a cage ..
________________________________________
Have you exchanged
'It's a last-minute PR move on their part, and they're trying to use youth unfairly to create a better brand image in the city,' said Erin McElroy of the SF Anti-Eviction Mapping Project."
This truly bothers me. This guy is like the members of MADD who are upset with ride programs because it means people won't get caught for DUI. Or those who are gleeful when civlians die in a way that proves their point.
When it comes to something like donating money to help poor kids, I don't care who is doing it or why. I care that the kids are being helped. It's obvious who views them as political pawns when one person feels it's "unfair" that they are receiving financial assistance because it doesn't play into his picture of the world. I'll bet Mr. Erin McElroy donates exactly $0 to help these kids out.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
What would be unfair would be to continue to continue the division of rich, clean suburbs far outside the city, only ot be reached by environmentally unfriendly and space/road-wasting cars, and create infrastructure for the upper middle class there - and allow them to avoid contact with the less fortunate.
To find efficient solutions (aka Busses) to transport workers in the city and thus mix income in parts of the city and even help other parts of the population to choose a efficient way of transportation and help in reducing the traffic is *not* unfair. If at all, it may be considered communist.
How does Google employees waiting at bus stops cost the city money? Where's this loss coming from that Google must compensate for? Or is this just knee-jerk hostility from the usual suspects?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
1. Welfare
2. Gentrification
One approach says "give the poor some stuff to help them get a leg up, live slightly better and afford them some opportunities." The other says "Give the rich some room to grown in poor/bad neighborhoods and see if things trickle down to improve the local economy."
Well? I'm a little undecided which is best because frankly, the first option would work on me. I have been on public assistance in the past. I didn't like it and got off of it as soon as possible. On the other hand, some people are quite compfortable wallowing in that sh!t.
Meanwhile, the things I have seen come through gentrification have been successful. I have not seen any information related to gentrification failures other than "they say don't! whites not welcome here!" and then they don't do it. So if anyone can point to "gentrification gone bad" I'd be interested in learning about it.
Had the right idea.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
1. Corporation does nothing to help the poor.
- Evil.
2. Corporation does something to help the poor.
- PR move.
'It's a last-minute PR move on their part, and they're trying to use youth unfairly to create a better brand image in the city,'
Ironically, when I read this statement, it sounded like a line straight out of Big Tobacco's Advertising 101 playbook.
Don't be so quick to judge. At least when Google does PR, they don't kill millions of people in the process selling their product.
The current plan is to allow the children of the peasants to gather windfall in the orchards of Google. This costs Google a tiny fraction of it's vast wealth, and makes it seem that they care about the peasants, because they are selflessly helping the children! Hopefully the stupid peasants will shut up and gratefully accept this bright trinket, so the serious project of evicting them from their land can continue unimpeded.
Don't (get caught) doing evil.
Why is Snark Required?
You don't have to stay home every day. 1 day a week for a meeting etc. And you don't waste 2 hours a day getting ready and traveling to work. Plus I know people who leave a group Skype call on all day. It's very easy to lock yourself in a study ifyou have kids or a dog wife
If I had a dog wife I would be "working late" at the office..
"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", "a person appeared from behind the bus and quickly smashed the whole of the rear window"
"So we'll continue to work with the city on these fees, and in the meantime will fund MUNI passes for low income students [an existing program] for the next two years.'"
One of these groups is judged by our society as being "evil" and the other as "progressive".
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
"Should this mythical land of the free allow you to run a bus service with vehicles that are a menace to its passengers or other road users?"
They're not a menace. That's emotional talk from someone who feels as if they want to be taken care of by others.
"Would you mind if this bus service cherry-picks the profitable routes, so that companies that try to offer more balanced public transport go bankrupt?"
Yes. Google is allowed to run a bus service for it's employees without regard to whatever service San Francisco wants to run. Maybe San Fran ought to hire Google to run it's busses.
Well said, and very likely true.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
I still don't understand the uproar over Googlers carpooling to work...
Why should we applaud the good prince's largesses? Yes, this is actually nice, encouraging the use of public buses and giving short change for that.
But I find it weird that a giant company wants to substitute itself with what should the town's/muncipality's/local government's duties. And it's a PR move anyway, one that reinforces the notion that a giant private company can appriopriate public space, pay little to no tax and do whatever it wants with no accountability.
In general, I don't get the cultural fascination that US americans have for charity, while at the same time showing extreme disdain for welfare, public services, public funding of infrastructure (except for roads, military and prisons, go figure) and even decent conditions of employment.
E.g. waiters/waitresses are to be paid starvation wages, and rely on tips. Why do they have to beg?, is it so that customers can feel superior or something?, I have trouble understanding this.
Google hides its profits in the Carribean and pays no taxes. What about fixing that. Hire well paid accountant/fiscalist lawyer types to try and close as many of those fucking tax loopholes as they can. Billions upon billions are missing.
Google wants to give $6.8 million in charity money over two years, probably getting some more tax deduction in the way. Fuck them.
Seriously? We're talking about California. Because Google has money, they should have the right to redistribute it as they see fit.
You are an ignorant idiot. Stop being one.
Should this mythical land of the free allow you to run a bus service with vehicles that are a menace to its passengers or other road users? Without proper education of it's bus drivers? Without any insurance? Would you mind if this bus service cherry-picks the profitable routes, so that companies that try to offer more balanced public transport go bankrupt?
You're right! Let's shut down Muni! It does all those things!
The appropriate response is to tax them properly. I would recommend the 65% top bracket that JFK thought was "sensible."
The racist rant was a tipoff to the ignorance. All kinds of people in our world, not exposing yourself to different ideas breeds the ignorant ideas of hatred, superiority over others, etc... Though I may be replying to a closed off mind. In that case..., go you!
Economic eviction not gentrification is the issue.
Mostly, it's a problem for renters, who get evicted or have their rents priced out of their reach when someone buys the house/unit they are renting,
It generally has nothing whatsoever to do with Google, other than highly paid people are capable of paying higher rents, and Google tends to pay its employees well. But if the now-priced-out-of-range rental unit were not rented by someone from Google or Twitter or Facebook, or Genentech, or Apple, or some other company, of which many are increasingly based in San Francisco, they would either be rented by someone else with more money than the previous occupants, or they would stand empty, and provide a tax write-off as a loss at the higher rental rate.
There are in fact huge amounts of both housing and office space in SF that are currently standing empty as a tax write-off for some absurd per square foot rental cost that no one in their right mind will be willing to pay.
Note that the vast majority of the investment driving the economic eviction in San Francisco is *not* coming from the tech industry, it is instead coming from foreign investors. Out of 6 offers I made on houses in San Francisco - houses I fully intended to live in, not merely hold as investments or use as rental properties or "flip" in the new real estate bubble - all six were bid out by over 25% at the last second by all cash offers from foreign investors.
Very few countries allow foreign ownership of property; the U.S. is one of the few which does; Japan, China, Mexico, the Philippines, Australia, and Thailand, among others. Minnesota does not permit foreign ownership of agricultural land, period, and does not allow corporate ownership of such land, either, unless associated with an existing long-held family farm. Here's an interesting resource:
http://www.academia.edu/106796...
Perhaps it's time to take a page from one of these books, and apply the same restrictions on a state-wide level, rather than bitching about San Francisco in particular, since San Francisco has no legal ability to regulate foreign ownership.
I imagine the Real Estate agents would not be terrifically happy, since most of their "big fish" clients are foreign buyers.
It said poor students, which I took to mean college students.
P.S. I happen to be light skinned person of German Irish descent. I've been up and down in my life. Had good conversations with people of many descents. People are people, basically, where ever you go. I also have known many non-darker skinned people who use food stamps. They might act strangely also. It's a human condition. But if you have the need to feel you are better than others, perhaps that's your issue to deal with.
and free eviction notices for their parents. Such a deal.
> 'It's a last-minute PR move on their part, and they're trying to use youth unfairly to create a better brand image in the city,'
dot dot dot said someone who doesn't realize that's exactly what their own heart-warming party does for a living when seeking power to dominate others.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Coincidentally, Thursday's Google Doodle was Grapes of Wrath-inspired...
"Wherever there's a tech company not payin' enough to use city bus stops, I'll be there."
--Tom Joad
They are investing in affordable housing for non-employees:
http://www.nbcbayarea.com/blogs/press-here/Google-Invests-in-Affordable-Housing-in-Mountain-View--222628971.html
Try being jobless after your unemployment benefits have run out, and not being able to even get a stinking minimum wage job because everybody who even looks at you sideways from such places judges you as so ridiculously overqualified that they don't want to spend the time training you (since they expect you will high-tail it out of there as soon as something that is more within your field comes along... an evaluation that, in the end, is actually entirely correct).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Forking idiots in SF don't understand that if a city allows crappy neighborhoods to sit without investment, they're dooming their children to shitty schools and poor emergency response from fire and police departments. It is through gentrification that cities rebuild and thus rebuild their tax base. San Francisco is a very expensive city in which to live. What they should be doing from the government's side is accepting donations from successful businesses to fund more affordable housing -- that helps businesses AND city revenues as well as the citizens whom they both serve.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Definitely. The Google busses should be permitted, but required to be common carriers since they utilize common resources. Force them to carry whatever urban riff-raff want a free ride out to Mountain View. I'm sure there are urban youths who could make it a profitable venture to head out there.
I am a programmer, and it's easier to get a requirement clarified if I'm in the office than if I have to call the boss and wait hours for him to return my voice mail.
I am a programmer, working on integration between my company's software and third-party software. But this third party charges per location in which its software is deployed. So I have to keep test and production under one roof.
I am a programmer, and I take the city bus to and from work in November through the end of March (northern hemisphere). In many cases, I've found it easier to work on hobby projects on my compact laptop on the bus to and from work than at home while being compelled to listen to my roommate's loud oldies radio.
Convince your generation that pregnancy is a bad decision, and your generation will be the last generation, ever.
Case in point: the Shakers died out. But let me try to guess what the other AC meant: "Convince the 'less fortunate' (most of whom made bad decisions like getting knocked up before becoming economically ready to raise a child)". If you're referring to victims of sexual contact without informed consent, or people who procreated before falling on hard times, there are plenty of families looking to adopt.
The slower a bus goes, the more potential overtime the city will have to pay and the more busses the city will need to use for a given route to maintain the same headway
Perhaps I have trouble relating because the bus system in my home town has an hour headway.
In terms of government services offered to domestic partnerships, I don't see the difference between a gay couple and any other infertile couple. But if demand for housing in a particular part of a city causes rent to rise too rapidly, wages are unlikely to rise fast enough to let tenants continue to afford their leases. So where are they supposed to live instead?
The line between gay domestic partnerships and zoophile "marriage" is that gay humans can give informed consent to creating the partnership.
That or the other anonymous commenter was just trying to find a more polite way to say bitch.
How about google supports paying more local taxes so that the local transit district can provide the services for free, and forever.
Local taxes would go to Mountain View, where the main Google campus is located, not San Francisco, unless they were willing to merge their transit district with that of the rest of the peninsula, which they've historically gone bat shit crazy every time it's been suggested in the last 30 years.
Also, California prohibits city, county, and municipal income taxes, so it's not like in New York, where the city would be allowed to come yank the money out of your pocket, assuming your job was in San Francisco instead of Mountain View in the first place. Instead San Francisco collects service charges, property taxes, receives money from the state general fund, which together accounted for about 2/3rd of their $6B in revenue in the last year for which they were willing to publish numbers. Other local taxes and federal funds account for another ~$1B.
As a side note, less than 5% of the income San Francisco collects goes to fund aid/assistance programs; 50% of it goes for personnel, with almost a third of that going to pension obligations for retired city employees. About half of one percent goes for facilities maintenance (parking garages, schools, parks, and so on).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
Other states where a city, county, and municipal income taxes is also prohibited include Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, Texas, and West Virginia. You'd probably know this, if you actually lived in California, instead of being someone from out of state trying to tell San Francisco how it should run things with Google or the other companies running busses.
Excelling at [currently demanded] occupations requires certain kinds of biological advantages that most people just don't have. The problem is that our society has been systematically eliminating most of the occupations where an honest, hard-working, but not-especially-bright-nor-politically-savvy person can make a decent living.
Then perhaps we need to encourage people with those biological advantages to breed more.
The problem is that carpooling allows Google employees to increase demand for the same land that less affluent people are renting. With fairly inelastic supply of land, this causes the price of a place to live to rise sharply and beyond the means of the complaining people.
Google employees that work in Mountain View should live in/near Mountain View.
I KUT J00 M4NG!!!
Add a spouse and a couple of toddlers to your home office and see how it compares.
You may find my book, Getting Laid for Nerds, helpful.
Seems to me, I've heard this plot somewhere before.
It seems they've brought the scheme up to date by outsourcing the actual work.
Have gnu, will travel.
IIRC, the tried exactly that, but were stopped by legal reasons.
bickerdyke
So if you have a private car and live in the Bay Area, should you also be required to carry whatever urban riff-raff want a ride to wherever you're going?
Perhaps it's time to take a page from one of these books, and apply the same restrictions on a state-wide level, rather than bitching about San Francisco in particular, since San Francisco has no legal ability to regulate foreign ownership.
Bigotry is so interesting. Here, we go from a bunch of people wanting cheap rent to foreigners bad without any logical connection between the two.
Out of 6 offers I made on houses in San Francisco - houses I fully intended to live in, not merely hold as investments or use as rental properties or "flip" in the new real estate bubble - all six were bid out by over 25% at the last second by all cash offers from foreign investors.
Was the property at that 25% premium still a good investment? If so, then perhaps you should bid more next time or snipe those auctions just like the pros did. If not, then a foreign investor just donated to the US economy. Send him a thank you letter.
Perhaps it's time to take a page from one of these books, and apply the same restrictions on a state-wide level, rather than bitching about San Francisco in particular, since San Francisco has no legal ability to regulate foreign ownership.
Bigotry is so interesting. Here, we go from a bunch of people wanting cheap rent to foreigners bad without any logical connection between the two.
You reordered the sentence to put the conclusion before the supporting evidence, so of course it sounds bigoted; that was pretty clearly your intent, when you went out of your way to edit the markup language so you could take those sentences out of order.
Out of 6 offers I made on houses in San Francisco - houses I fully intended to live in, not merely hold as investments or use as rental properties or "flip" in the new real estate bubble - all six were bid out by over 25% at the last second by all cash offers from foreign investors.
Was the property at that 25% premium still a good investment? If so, then perhaps you should bid more next time or snipe those auctions just like the pros did. If not, then a foreign investor just donated to the US economy. Send him a thank you letter.
Was it worth another 25%, and the extra effort to make an all-cash offer? It depends... there are three dfferent ways of looking at the word "investment" in this context:
(1) As a place to live... definitely "no"; the house was priced about market value to begin with, and all the bids were coming in close to that by 1-2%; certainly nothing close to a 25% premium, until the last minute.
(2) As a property intended to be held for ~5 years to appreciate, and then flipped as an actual investment property? It's very iffy. It depends on whether you believe that the current speculation bubble in San Francisco is the result of an actual depressed valuation, or whether you believe it's being driven by external influences (as I do). Certainly, we are not seeing an upswing in actual owner occupied homes, which means that it is in fact an investment bubble. If you believe the bubble will last that long, then yes.
(3) As a foreign investor using a purchase in excess of $500,000 to qualify under the EB-5 Immigrant Investor program as a fast track means of getting a green card? Clearly, it's a great investment. It's half the cost of the in excess of $1,000,000 that they'd have to invest otherwise. See http://www.uscis.gov/i-526 "U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services form I-526, Immigrant Petition by Alien Entrepreneur".
As the CNN article says, four states accounted for 58% of all foreign sales: 23% Florida, 17% California, 9% Arizona, 9% Texas. See the CNN article here: http://money.cnn.com/2013/07/0... It's interesting that these are also the states with currently accelerating "recovery" in the real estate market.
While that is an interesting theory and one sufficiently worthy that I regret to some degree insulting you, San Francisco isn't part of a "targeted employment area" (or TEA) so it doesn't get the half off. The green card would have to put in at least $1 million in theory. Similarly, Florida only has one such TEA.
Having said that, there's other ways to make that work. For example, the EB-5 visa holders could be flipping houses between fellow EB-5 holders. Say acquire a million dollar loan through a handling entity which is used to buy real estate from another EB-5 holder (at 25% over market rate and auction snipe at last minute, that would keep the risk of losing the home down to pretty much nil). Then on your EB-5 visa application mention the assets, but not the loan (which might not count legally due to it being in another country).
Presto! A million dollar or so qualification for the visa. Then you sell the asset to the next person in line and pay off your loan. The costs to the EB-5 holder end up being a small amount of interest, the handling charges for the entity managing the whole charade, transaction costs of the actual real estate sales, and the $1500 application fee for the EB-5 visa.
Here's the thing. Because the actual costs proportion to the real estate are probably near negligible (it gets flipped to the next EB-5 applicant), there's no serious reason to "save" half a million dollars by targeting a TEA.
At that point, the ideal markets are places with high real estate prices and some vacant real estate at that level available for the flip, requiring less transactions. For example, San Francisco could require one to three real estate transactions, while Modesto might require half a dozen.
So yes, this sort of activity could be driving the market or conversely, this sort of activity could be attracted to unusually high volume, high price markets because that is more efficient.
But then we get to your recommended solution. Why would it be a good idea to ban foreign ownership of US real estate? That remains a non sequitur. Even if we are truly seeing yet another immigration policy gimmick pumping up the price of real estate in San Francisco, the solution would be to fix or eliminate the policy not screw with ownership of property.
Nobody won -- the developer is holding the property, which remains zoned industrial, until market conditions (financing availability) and political considerations give them more leeway in its use.
Very few countries allow foreign ownership of property; the U.S. is one of the few which does; Japan, China, Mexico, the Philippines, Australia, and Thailand, among others
Canada, as well, which is causing similar issues with property costs in the areas of Vancouver and various other large cities.
San Francisco isn't part of a "targeted employment area" (or TEA) so it doesn't get the half off. The green card would have to put in at least $1 million in theory. Similarly, Florida only has one such TEA.
The easiest way to deal with this would be to buy the property in one of the TEAs (and yes, SF has large swaths of them). That's pretty trivial; here are the California TEAs: http://www.hcd.ca.gov/fa/ez/en... and here is the map of TEAs (Enterprise zones) that qualify under the EB-5 program in San Francisco: http://www.hcd.ca.gov/fa/ez/pd...
[...]So yes, this sort of activity could be driving the market or conversely, this sort of activity could be attracted to unusually high volume, high price markets because that is more efficient.
Well, there are 10,000 EB-5 program slots available per year, and if we apportion EB-5 activity proportionally to percentage of foreign property purchases, then that's 1,700 home purchases a year (this is being very generous).
Assuming we ignore the $500,000 end run around the problem by investing in a real estate holding company in a TEA, rather than directly in real estate, and those purchases are all in the $1,000,000+ range, then there is a huge incentive to push equity values above the $1,000,000 mark - just barely - when they would be closer to the $800,000 mark. This both guarantees you a winning bid (the +25% I mentioned earlier), and it pushes up the median prices by a like amount.
Unfortunately, this is a cascade effect - as anyone who listens to the radio in the Bay Area can tell you, there are huge numbers of companies trying to sell you "How to flip property in the Bay Area" seminars, books, software, kits, and so on. As the median price goes up for a reason other than an actual increase in value, the available real estate is additionally squeezed by this "band wagon" effect.
But then we get to your recommended solution. Why would it be a good idea to ban foreign ownership of US real estate? That remains a non sequitur. Even if we are truly seeing yet another immigration policy gimmick pumping up the price of real estate in San Francisco, the solution would be to fix or eliminate the policy not screw with ownership of property.
This would be perhaps a good way to deal with the immigration policy "gimmick", but unfortunately that gimmick is there as a matter of economic and immigration policy (a policy I'd probably agree with you is bigoted, due to it's emergent properties, assuming they're intentional). The purpose of the policy is to stem a tide of immigration by making a carrot available, and putting the carrot mostly out of reach of the average person in the countries people would like to leave in order to come to the U.S.. It's there so that we can point at it and say "look, if you don't want to wait, you can always buy yourself to the head of the line instead".
So in answer, I have about as much hope of that particular loophole being closed as I do seeing government switch from giving tax breaks to giving grants so that they have to account for the money changing hands through political cronyism, instead of hiding it in some obscure part of the tax code.
As Minnesota has demonstrated with their agricultural land purchase policies, it's within the boundaries of states rights to prevent foreign purchase of real estate, without running afoul of the Constitution's Article I Section 8 Commerce Clause, and so it's addressable at a state level. Obviously, if you have a huge project that's not going to get funded without someone like an Adnan Khashoggi footing the bill, you can either take that up at a legislative level to grant an exception.
But more likely, what will happen i