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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."
Even when given the choice to telecommute, I often choose not to. I often find its much easier to get work done face to face, that and when you're in an actual work environment (or at least, aren't at home) there are fewer distractions.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
Same here, I think we let work encroach into personal life enough as it is. Home is home, I want nothing to do with work at home.
Mostly random stuff.
'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.
1. Corporation does nothing to help the poor.
- Evil.
2. Corporation does something to help the poor.
- PR move.
"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
It would be absolutely awesome of Samtrans or Muni provided a service similar to what the Google buses provide, but they don't, and they have actively worked to avoid doing so. So the activists really have no leg to stand on here. They should be trying to fix public transit in the bay area, not prevent people from working around its brokenness.
I am a programmer, and I find working with other programmers nearby to be very valuable. Having randoms wander into the office is not so good, but there's a good synergy to over-the-cube-wall conversation when you are coding in a team. Having worked from home for the past decade, this is the primary thing that I miss. The commute, not so much... :)
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.
But the community had to pay for a bit of yellow paint to mark the bus-stop and a Festivus pole to fix a sign with 'Bus-Stop' on it. That 'investment' needs to generate money!
This, so much this.
Seriously, San Francisco - What the fuck? I don't understand why this even counts as an issue - Would it really help your budget that much if you could force Google and company to take public transit to work? Or more likely, would it just massively increase congestion on your roads and make the average SF'er bitch about those damned geeks driving up the cost of parking spaces?
Like it or not, Silicon Valley didn't destroy SF, it made SF. You want to go back to the 1970s? Just move to Detroit today, and enjoy your cheap housing and everything that comes with it.
The Google buses amount to nothing more than carpools, an environmentally friendly way to move a few thousand people from home to work and back every day. Just admit it, this has nothing to do with public transit, and everything to do with gentrification - Not a bad word, BTW, it just means making the slums safe for human habitation again.
Exactly. The cure for inequality is to bring them down a bit. To hell with elevating everyone else up, it's too hard. But taking and taking and taking until they are like the rest is easy.
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.
You don't understand what's going on here.
People have been complaining that Google uses public bus stops without paying for them. Google thought that was reasonable and offered to pay the city for the use of the stops, but state law doesn't allow the city to charge a reasonable amount for their use. So, Google and the city worked out what they thought would be a reasonable amount, and Google is paying that in the form of a donation, buying bus passes for kids. Meanwhile, Google is helping the city lobby to change the state law, so that the company can simply pay for the right to use the bus stops.
Google has been trying to do the right things here, from beginning to end. Providing buses reduces congestion and greenhouse gases, and is a nice perk for employees who want to live in the city.
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.
Are you proposing that the city should do that? The city doesn't have any right or power to tax Google (though it collects a lot of property taxes and sales taxes from the Google employees who live in the city, as well as property and other taxes for Google's building in the city). The taxes you're talking about that Google manages to avoid are largely federal, so San Francisco wouldn't see a dime of them anyway. Frankly, no one would see anything; they'd disappear into the federal deficit without making a ripple.
In any case, not only is your tax argument completely irrelevant to the question, it's pretty ridiculous. Do you pay more federal taxes than you have to? If a company can legally avoid paying billions, do you seriously expect them to volunteer it? If you really think this is a problem, talk to your representatives about changing the federal laws.
Personally, I think that corporate taxes, like all other forms of hidden taxation, are evil. All taxes are ultimately paid by the people as a whole, and taxing various, intermediate cash flows obscures how much the people are paying. Money Google pays in taxes is money that can't be paid to investors (which is taxed as capital gains), can't pay employees (which is taxed as income), can't spend on goods and services (which are taxed in all sorts of ways -- some of them also evil), and can't invest (which pushes the money to other companies which may buy stuff, pay employees, etc.). Taxes are necessary, but they should be transparent. Property taxes are good. Income taxes are good, including capital gains income taxes -- though mandatory withholdings are obnoxious. Sales taxes are okay, and it's even fine to tax different goods differently -- taxing luxury cars harder than food, for example, makes sense. The key is that all taxes should be directly paid by and be visible to the voters.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
The point is that any city in a civilised country will have to do some kind regulation of its bus services, because otherwise all kind of shady bus companies will pop up.
You realize that you can charter a private bus, from dozens of different companies, just about anywhere in the US, right? That you or I could hire a bus right now, to haul our 40 closest friends halfway across the country and drop us off in a cornfield in Nebraska, no questions asked?
The only part of this making it at all an unusual situation, Silicon Valley has decided to offer them on a regular basis to tech workers as a job perk, thereby filling a glaring gap in SF's public transit system.
Or looked at differently - When companies do this (and they do) to haul migrant workers from "stops" at every Home Depot in the area, to pick crops on a Georgia plantation, we applaud them for accommodating the needs of the poor. When Google does the same as a way to work around CalTrans' abysmal inter-city service, we give them hell. Pick a stance, folks - Accommodating and environmentally sound, or gentrifying and elitist?
wow, 5 years out, still blaming bush? You need to move on.
Blame Bush?
Hell, I still blame Reagan.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The difference is owning vs renting. If you own and prices double, you can cash out if you want to. If you rent and prices double, no soup for you. Maybe you pay the extra; maybe you move and take a longer commute and find a new daycare and relocate your kids to a new school and say goodbye to the neighbors you've gotten to know and love. It can be very disruptive to community and continuity, and I understand the concern.
50 miles south of San Francisco, there are discussions about whether the owner of a mobile home community can decide to sell the land to a big housing developer. The senior citizens who live there know that if he is able to sell, they'll have to move out of the area because there are no affordable alternatives, and good luck taking your manufactured home with you.
California adds an interesting wrinkle with its Prop 13, a 1979 law saying that housing values for tax purposes can only rise 2% each year if you don't sell your home and property tax is capped at ~1% of housing value, so property tax bills are pretty stable compared to other places. That law was partly to keep elderly from being pushed out of their homes by skyrocketing property taxes. However, properties are reassessed at market value upon sale, so if these folks have to move, their new home may carry a hefty tax increase without necessarily being any nicer of a place to live.