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Some Root For a Tech Comeuppance In San Francisco
HughPickens.com writes: David Streitfeld writes in the NYT that cities do not usually cheer the downfall or even the diminishment of the hometown industry, but the relationship between San Francisco and the tech community has grown increasingly tense as the consequences for people who do not make their living from technology become increasingly unpleasant. "It's practically a ubiquitous sentiment here: People would like a little of the air to come out of the tech economy," says Aaron Peskin. "They're like people in a heat wave waiting for the monsoon." Signs of distress are plentiful. The Fraternite Notre Dame's soup kitchen was facing eviction after a rent increase of nearly 60 percent. Two eviction-defense groups were evicted in favor of a start-up that intended to lease the space to other start-ups. The real estate site Redfin published a widely read blog post that said the number of teachers in San Francisco who could afford a house was exactly zero. "All the renters I know are living in fear," says Derrick Tynan-Connolly. "If your landlord dies, if your landlord sells the building, if you get evicted under the Ellis Act" — a controversial law that allows landlords to reclaim a building by taking it off the rental market — "and you have to move, you're gone. There's no way you can afford to stay in San Francisco."
I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area before and it's a real shithole (as is most of California). Why stay when there are so many better places to live?
If you own your home, you have the huge advantage that you don't get gentrified out and won't be forced to move. The down side is that you may never be able to move. If you rent your house, you run the risk of getting gentrified out and might have to move. Unfortunately it's not an easy problem and most of the proposed solutions seem to do more harm than good.
Hopefully there will be another dotcom bust soon to put the tail between the Almighty GOOG's legs
There are too many people in California in general and too many people in San Francisco in particular. (Not as bad as LA, but anyway...) If you moved to a place you knew you could never afford to buy housing, which was one of the most highly desirable real estate markets in the world, and then rents spiraled out of control, you have only yourself to blame. I have sympathy for people who are born there as renters and can't afford to leave. I have zero sympathy for people who moved there and then complained that they couldn't make it.
This is a problem faced by the whole wide world, and unless you want to skip socialism and head straight for communism, there's no fairer way to decide who can live there than by who can afford to live there. If you think you have a way to implement a meritocracy in our society, I'm interested, but mostly for the sake of amusement.
Our whole society is founded upon the idea that might makes right, and he who has the gold gets to decide who gets to live where. I'm highly sympathetic to the notion that this is harmful, but it really is our founding principle. If teachers can't afford to live in SF, then maybe people unwilling to home school should start moving their families out, too. Big dirty cities (SF fits this description admirably, if you include environs, needed for "big" though not for "dirty") are no place to raise a family in any case. Maybe SF doesn't need fast food restaurants. Maybe it's not just okay but actually desirable to gentrify some cities, and let the culture in them disperse to other areas that could use some that isn't growing between someone's toes.
TL;DR: If what is going on with SF rents is wrong, then our whole society is wrong, and you can't fix SF without fixing everything else, too. They can enact local laws, but as long as the state works against them, it's always only masturbatory.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
How about just move to Austin? Rent is cheaper, good amount of tech companies, and the native Texans regard anyone from California with respect and awe.
The real problem is that San Francisco adamantly refuses to build more housing to meet demand. Sorry, but that's the way the market works. If you don't increase the supply to meet the demand, the price is going to go up as the demand does. Instead, though, they insist that they want to keep it "the way it is", not build new apartment buildings that might relieve some of the excess demand for housing, and the corresponding infrastructure to go with it. That leaves them only with hoping that the demand goes down, which is idiotic.
I hope it does go down though - I hope the tech industry increasingly decides to just say "F**k San Francisco" and moves elsewhere, where there's more land, cheaper cost of living (because at this point almost anywhere is cheaper), and less insane/stubborn neighbors. San Francisco has its upsides, sure, but none that are worth enough to make me want to live there unless you're offering me 4-5 times as much as I make elsewhere. Let San Francisco's economy tank, because that's what they clearly would prefer to actually dealing with the boom that most cities would bend over backwards for half of.
Okay, maybe if you literally get a job with Google, move there. But otherwise, why? The pay premium you get from living there doesn't make up for the sky-high housing costs. And most of these people live in San Fransisco and then do a long commute out to a suburban area. It's really not worth it.
The tech market is hot. The main implication of that is you don't have to move to a special city to do tech. You can work somewhere like Chicago instead. There is still a big tech community, the opportunity to work with cutting edge tech, a much bigger city, AND you get to live in a four bedroom house on programmer pay and only commute a half hour on the train.
If the people of San Fransisco don't want you, don't bother them. You can live anywhere. Probably somewhere nicer.
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What the hell makes San Francisco so special? Besides the cable cars and sourdough bread, I mean.
Yea, San Francisco isn't alone here. In Canada most people can't afford a house in Vancouver or Toronto, neither of which are related to tech startups. Heck, people with disposable income are what support all the quaint places that make living in these places desirable.
the movie Demolition Man Seems oddly prescient now. I believe it was LA, but seems San Francisco is trying to build their own version. Clean, shiny, everyone trying desperately to not offend anyone else, and those who don't or can't fit the mold are swept out of sight. Does this happen in other places? Sure, but it's sadly ironic that the center of the free love, countercultural revolution has come to this.
My heart goes out to those evicted, or fearing eviction. To my untrained eye, the problems seem like an obvious result of supply-and-demand. SF has limited land, hasn't built much in the way of housing for a long time, and is in high demand. Of course the housing prices will go way up. The only solutions are to make it less desirable (lower demand), or increase housing (increase supply). Here's an interesting article: https://medium.com/@Scott_Wien...
Other cities have done this, e.g., DC has aggressively added new units.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
I think it would be fairly interesting to see what happens as nearly all food and cleaning and basic services workers get largely priced out of working in the city. Either wages will go up, tech workers will have to commute out of the city just to do dry cleaning, or these companies will have to create their own internal jobs for all of these things and help provide housing to their non-tech employees. That last one makes me smile thinking about Corporations on the road to Shadowrunesque extraterritoriality. On a more serious note though. When it comes to people saying "why don't they just move" a large swath of people have lived in one place their whole life. Moving out of their home town let alone home state can create a ton of uncertainty and doesn't guarantee they will find a new job or housing. And embarking on that kind of thing outside the geographic area of the safety net that family and friends provide is also daunting to some people. Just some food for thought really.
It's really amusing to watch this whole dotcom bubble from the late 90s being replayed almost exactly the same way. VC valuations lead to IPOs that lead to temporary market insanity, and it all comes crashing down when people realize it can't last forever. And just like the first dotcom boom, the products are websites, phone apps and other software.
I guess the thing SF and California in general have going for them is the climate, so it's not like San Francisco is going to become some Rust Belt city when the bottom falls out. But, the reality distortion field around SF, SV and Los Angeles is really powerful. Coming from a place where a Lincoln Town Car was an aspirational vehicle, and seeing 25 year old kid CEOs driving Maseratis and Mercedes is a big shocker.
I do feel for people who have normal jobs or are artsy types in SF. Can you imagine being, say, a cop or a civil servant in the county clerk's office making the statewide civil service wage, and having to compete for housing with someone who's making $250K working for Google or Apple, and just wants to live in hipster land? (That's another interesting phenomenon -- these techies could easily afford a house in SV closer to work, but they choose a multi-hour commute so they can live in a hipster loft.
There must be an opportunity here to make renting better. Which YC startup will step in to become the Uber of landlords and fix this?
No. There's no fundamental human right to live in San Francisco. It would be a problem if people weren't allowed to leave San Francisco, but that is not the problem in this case.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
San Franciscans have decided what they want the city to be like - a place where no-one but the richest can afford to live.
They may say otherwise but all of the ACTUAL CHOICES they make reinforce the notion that SF wants the city to be for the rich.
On a side note, I can only assume that San Franciscans really enjoy watching homeless people suffer since choices they make also lead to that outcome.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm rooting for a 2012 level of "uppance" for SanFran.
There are plenty of affordable homes in Detroit. Probably thousands of properties that can be had for almost nothing from HUD.
It was a thriving and prosperous city until its golden goose moved away.
SF is nothing like it was in its heyday. From the 60s to the mid 80s, SF and most of California was great. Not so much now, sadly. Too much gentrification, too many illegal aliens, too much focus on tech. I'm in IT, but the tech sector really has damaged SF. It's an us vs them mentality for most techies. I don't feel this way, but sadly, most of the techs I know are asshats.
I hate all the "new" tech, I really do. Most of these new techies are actually pretty lame. Most of the people I run in are bragging about their "high-end" apartments with a view of the bay, or how much of Javascript/node.js rockstar they are. When they learn I'm an old school mainframe programmer, their eyes glass over. They don't know UNIX, or even Linux. These guys couldn't write a decent program on their own without help from some whizbang IDE. Most of these guys walk around with shiny new MacBooks like they are the next big thing and no one has discovered them yet. They are annoying, immature, and overpaid. I make just under 100k, live in a tiny, one bedroom apartment with a view of the street. I have fast Internet, a pizza shop next door, I can walk to work. I have money to spend, but want to retire before I'm 50, so I am something of a cheapskate. I took the advice of my college professors in the mid 90s and went into mainframes. The kids I talk with think I'm "old", but they are slaves to the latest IT fads. Banking is stable, fun enough as far as IT goes, and I'm retiring in 10 years.
Once Donald Trump enforces the law and kicks out ten million illegal immigrants there will be plenty of housing. Of course we won't be able to drive down to the front of Home Depot or Lowes and pick up a truck full of guys to be able to afford to maintain our houses, but I guess there are trade offs.
I thought San Francisco was the hub of liberal ideals and very progressive. Now we see Republican price gouging, schism based on class and fear mongering? What the heck happened? I expect co-ops and communes. Peace and love.
Surely the problem here is not the tech bubble, or any other specific industry, but the unregulated housing market exploiting a finite resource?
People in less lucrative professions are being priced out of the market, because landlords are squeezing the market as much as they can. They are entitled to do this because there are no restrictions on them. Isn't the answer to put some restrictions in (e.g. rent controls on a proportion of housing) that keep this finite resource accessible for everyone?
Some may view this as too restrictive on a "free market" but it is extremely obvious that this market is causing real harm to some of the most vulnerable and poorest in society, and benefitting nobody other than those who own property. Those who are in a position to own enough property to rent it out are an extremely small elite, at this time.
J-1 cultural exchange visa program. Can be used to find people to work that roll and it goes in line with the H1B abuse.
The only solutions are to make it less desirable (lower demand)
San Francisco has been trying this solution for some time, by deliberately encouraging a higher than average number and insanity level of homeless. Streets that mostly small like urine, open drug use, all make SF a place I only sort of enjoy visiting anymore but sure as hell would not want to live in.
But still, people keep moving there because of the mystique...
I think what SF should do, is build a series of tunnels connecting all of the bushings in the main city - ala Houston or Minneapolis. In the other cities the tunnels protect against the weather; in the case of SF they would separate the workers from the homeless and offer a fun twist on the whole Eloi / Moorcock split, with SF's Eloi being the ones forced to retreat underground and working to support the Moorlocks on the surface.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you want to vault your way up a career ladder, you go where the jobs are. I dropped out of college with half of a music degree, and the Bay area was great to work my way into gainful employment. If venture capitalists want to reinforce this model with 25-35 mil units of investment into areas with massive costs of living, they must have some tangible proof that these areas are fertile grounds for return on investment.
Not exactly on topic, but the article, San Francisco's situation, and the conditions over time not just in cities, but states, nations, any identifiable economic area all point to what I consider a flaw in Economic reporting, that, to my amazement, many people fail to grasp.
The strength of any economy is reported as good, bad, improving, failing, the "world's best", the "world's worst" ... whatever rank you care to put on it ... based solely on the inflated value of the whole. City A is twice as prosperous as City B if the rents, wages, and prices are all twice City B's. No matter that an hour's wages buys the same square foot of land, the same block of cheese, the same latte, the same month of cable TV in both cities. City A is clearly "better" based on the Economic Data. If City A happens to be the most expensive city on the planet to work and live then it's defined as the wealthiest city on the planet, the most successful economy, the "place to be". Except as far as the day to day goes, it's just another, ordinary city.
[Somewhat more on topic] And then we get the issues regarding the transition from a City B economy to a City A economy ... there are people on fixed incomes or working in fields where the high wages aren't sustainable, who get stuck in the old economy when their fellow citizens are part of the new economy. They need each other ... someone has to build the homes, make the cheese, pour the latte ... but they can't afford each other. Similarly, if a visitor from City A comes to City B for a vacation, they seemingly have twice as much money to spend. But not at home, where twice as much buys just enough.
The economic realities are constantly shifting and the solution for SF residents of today is the same as it's always been ... wages and rents must go up, and some people must move to a City B (or even a City C) economy.
This is not really new ... time to roll the ubiquitous "is this news?" Slashdot comment. (Just kidding).
This isn't really about tech economy. It's about any boom that results in inflation.
Inflation sucks. (It's just that if you're part of the boom that's causing the inflation, you don't notice it, other than you're not nearly as rich as the numbers suggested you'd be rich.)
We should stop using government power to subsidize inflation. It always hurts someone. (I'm not saying we shouldn't allow people to be hurt, just that we shouldn't have policies that actively cause it to happen; we shouldn't be spending our tax money to make harmful inflation happen in the name of "growth.")
Abolish the Federal Reserve.
When I can't afford where I live, I move. And I've moved several times. Deal with it.
Do we have to have this argument every year? The reason SF is expensive has very little to do with recent trends in the tech industry -- they're just a current, visible scapegoat. There's a good, thorough overview here: http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/...
I was born in SF in the 70s and stayed in the area until after college. It has ALWAYS been expensive. It's a great place and I'd move back in a second if I could afford to, but I can't, so I don't. Yeah, it sucks that police, firefighters, and teachers can't often afford to live nearby, but it's been that way for DECADES.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Shoot the landlords and move the poor in wholesale... Also worked in China.
A whiny sense of entitlement that makes claim to something scarce simply because they want it...
Oh, boy.
A whiny sense of entitlement is quintessentially geek, judging by posts to Slashdot.
We're talking past each other; let me try again. No one is saying, "you may not live in SF". Anyone can live in SF, as long as you can pay for it. The problem is that SF housing costs more than many can afford. There's no human right to $500/month rents in SF. You may believe that it's good policy, and that's a different question. I suspect that SF has a long history of pretending that economics don't apply to its housing, based on the little I've read about it.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
Literally, unless you're Mitt or Donald. Really, I'm just as happy in the Midwest, where I can get a good house for a tiny fraction of the prices on either coast.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Because the problem centers around housing in a city with limited living space, let the assembled minds of Silicon Valley come up with...residential barges. Not the fake offshore pipe-dream country in the middle of the ocean kind of barge, but floating condo developments that could be built in a shipyard and then anchored to any suitable place in San Francisco Bay where they could become part of the city's housing stock without pushing anyone out of their homes.
Because barges full of techies would add to the city's tax and business base without displacing anyone from it, they would be a win-win for the San Francisco housing problem. After all, a miniature version of this solution has already been a success in Sausalito. Once the system is ironed out, condo barges would become an exportable idea to other places in the world with a housing squeeze. Social justice warriors, we're calling your bluff with this one. Either admit that you hate techies because they represent the evils of science, or forever hold your peace.
I am a well paid programming ("software engineer"), and I choose to live in SF despite the expense. Does the guy who paints watering cans have some higher priority over living in SF than I do? Not everyone on the planet Earth gets to live in SF just because they want to. There is only so much space in this relatively small city.
They're all white straight men. They shouldn't complain about a little economic downturn. It's a long time coming.
We face a similar problem in Toronto and Vancouver, except the subject is way more touchy: People buying up all the real estate and jacking up prices are mostly Chinese and lots of these properties are being bought with cash, no doubt lots of it 'ill-gotten gains'. The problem is, if someone even dares talk about it, right away he'll be branded a racist.
How is it fair that all this corrupt money comes into Canada and pushes up real estate prices? You think I'm just unhappy with my situation and a racist? Ok then, how about you read the story from the Financial Post:
http://business.financialpost....
Part of the reason for the massive property value in SF Bay area is due to monopolization. People want to blame the homeowners, but look at who owns property. The same mega companies own massive amounts of property and buy out anyone seen as competition. How many buildings are labelled "Avalon" in the Bay Area?
The fix to monopolization does require State intervention, but it's not mandating fixed prices and rate increases. It's by breaking up monopolies to increase competition and level the playing field.
I work in the Financial district and get to see the construction every damn day. There are massive buildings going up for housing, and several of those are already accepting lease applications.
Sure, it could have been done faster.. but hindsight is always 20/20.
The City should use eminent domain and take over large blocks, and rent them to public school teachers, college instructors, and make it available after that for people with an income up to 1.5 times the poverty level.
And you libertarian assholes, as Phil Ochs sang, "go find yourself another country to be part of".
mark "oh, that's right, you don't believe in countries"
Wrong, wrong wrong. The problem we're seeing in Vancouver and Toronto is cash deals to buy real-estate, cash deals made with corrupt money from China. Global and Mail, Financial Post and a few others have been writing about this problem for many years now (at least since 2012). Of course you don't hear too many people talking about it because if you dare to even talk about it, right away you're branded a racist.
So I guess I'm a racist for being upset over the fact that corrupt money is jacking up real-estate prices.
Just google "Financial post vancouver real estate china crackdown" A bunch of articles from different news outlets and different years will come up.
Whooops, somehow when I read your post the first time I skipped over 'neither of'. My bad :)
Actually, there is no difference on that point, because if you own, you also don't have a real right to live there, since the government can remove you from that land under eminent domain. You only have the privilege to pretend you own some land over which the government is sovereign.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
And they are right, it's never been fair though, so not exactly new(s) to anyone but them. One day they will figure out that the "techs" are not calling the shots and blaming them highlights a massive ignorance. Looking forward to those articles :)
The problem in Vancouver and Canada is corrupt money coming from China being used in cash deals to buy real-estate. Google 'financial post vancouver real estate china corruption'. Multiple articles from different outlets written in 2012, 2014 and 2015.
Consittering that kno teechirs can afford to live in san fransisko I gess the peps who life their will jist hav two del with a bunch of ignorint little brats.
Actually there is the Old Testament option that requires the return of capital assets to their original owner after 50 years. It's a bit messy, and the terminology only applies to farmland. But it is an alternative approach; one British politician did propose replacing all freeholds with a 50 year leasehold from the state.
One starbucks and one paid for sandwich for lunch every day @ 250 days a year is probably $2,000 a year. a well chosen rental property will pay for itself - i.e. maintenance and mortgage payments. Ask your parents to borrow the deposit...
"a controversial law that allows landlords to reclaim a building by taking it off the rental market"?
Its controversial that a landlord can decide to stop renting when the rental agreement is complete and decide to live in their own property?
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
This article is two years old, but goes into a good amount of detail on housing and rent in SF. A lot of the problem is due to people in various neighborhoods preventing, delaying, and increasing the cost of construction of new buildings.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
No, the choice was imposed from outside.
Who exactly is "the outside"?
What a load of crap. SF people vote regularily for the people who put the controls in place to make sure SF gets more SF every year... the tech industry hardly has anything to do with this beyond being an enabling force in letting prices get even higher because so many tech people can pay them...
The residents of SF have voted regularly to get the city and policies they have in place now, so don't go whining you want tech people to leave and then vote the other way.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A lease is not a privilege it is every bit a form of property as fee simple ownership.
Here's an idea... How about instead of blindly blaming the tech workers, someone makes an attempt to assign blame for the out-of-control rents to the people who actually have control over them?
I know it sounds like a wild plan, full of risk and possibly requiring an hour or two of actual research, but it seems to me that calling out the property holding companies and landlords would be a far more effective way to put a stop to the rent crisis in San Francisco.
I know it doesn't fit the narrative of xenophobia at all, because most of those people have lived in San Francisco for some time now. ...or maybe they don't. How would you know until you actually did a bit of research? Here's another possible avenue of research... Ask literally anyone working in the tech industry if they'd like to pay higher, or lower rent. ...then try and reconcile their answers with what's going on. How could it possibly be that despite every last one of them wanting to pay less in rent (something you have in common!) they are supposedly responsible for the increases in rent?
...or could it be that San Francisco's "natives" are really turning into a bunch of douchebag hipsters that think voicing their opinion is more important than having an opinion based on common sense and knowledge?
Who gives a shit about San Francisco? I live in Almaden (San Jose) and I commute to Santa Clara right now. The longest commute I ever had was to San Mateo but that was still much better than working in SF. I don't look for jobs in SF and I have told recruiters too many times I am not interested in working in San Francisco. The way I see it, there's no parking in SF and it is always damp and cold.
Artists have a long history of colonizing places that nobody else wants, and then adding value. Locally, we have an abandoned copper mining town that artists reclaimed and made their own, with galleries and restaurants that attract locals and tourists. Displaced artists will move on to the next ghost town.
We gladly accept those artists with talent in the Twin Cities which has a great culture of technology and art. These two things aren't necessarily opposed to each other. In fact, around the world famous Walker, the art district can be more expensive than downtown Minneapolis. The Walker, of course, having the namesake of the lumberjack that funded it and essentially kicked off the art district a few generations ago. I guess, I've come to realize a lot of these issues are cultural rather than specifically geographical.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Your property taxes and other cost of living will rise to the point where you can't afford to live there.
You will be forced to move when gentrification happens.
Be the best at being the best and you won't have a worry about taxes and societies and stuff.
"So, unless you're a mortgage-free homeowner, whoever holds the title on your property has the right (no quotes) to force you into indigency on a whim? "
The government can do that anytime. They can take away your house because you didn't pay your hyperinflating tax assessments, or write up a ton of bogus code violations because you refused to sell your house at a discount to a crony looking to buy.
What are property rights?
you've already been flamed left and right (and somehow manged a 5 insightful) so I'll skip all that and be a more constructive.
You're forgetting (ignoring?) the people infrastructure that all those tech workers depend on for their high quality of life. Police, Fire Department, Cooks, Shopkeepers, teachers (TF summary mentioned these ones), construction workers, etc, etc. These are the people that can't afford to live in San Fransisco.
What we're all forgetting (intentionally?) is what we did to these people in the past. Slavery for the lowest of them ( Cooks & Construction ) abject poverty for the rest. This is what they'd be doing in San Fransisco if they could, but digital communications make it much, much harder. We're talking about it right now, and some of us are afraid of it happening to us. We see the race to the bottom and we recognize we can't all be winners in winner take all. Yes, mathematically the economy isn't a zero sum game, but that doesn't really matter when you're making 25 cents/hr.
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(or woman) who's never been too broke to move. You don't get to choose the city your born in, and all it takes is once illness or a couple of layoffs in America to blow you out of the water. You'll also ignoring all the people those tech workers depend on (Police, Fire, Teachers, Construction Workers, Electricians, Shopkeeps, etc, etc) as well as the squalid living conditions most people had until we stopped allowing income inequality of the sort San Francisco has.
Moving isn't that easy, and the rich of San Fransisco want services people offer. So far what I see is them finding ways to get those services without really paying for them. A hundred years ago we called that slavery and were honest about it. These days we just blather something about personal responsibility while somebody loads 16 tons and sells their soul to the company store...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The discussion is about people complaining about being unable to invest in property. I'm arguing that it is possible to do so with the support of other family members... The reference to 'deposit' is the amount the mortgage provider requires you to provide as cash before it will lend you the rest of the purchase price of a property. I imagine the word is something different on the west side of the pond, but I assumed in the context it would be clear enough. Mea culpa.
The tech industry is the liveblood of the area. If they want substantial money to leave the city then they are asking for a lot of unintended consequences. Who do they think pays for most of the costs of various services and safety nets?
No one has a right to live in any particular place if they can't afford it. When there is high demand and limited housing the price i going to go up. This is not in the least unjust.
But not many programmers live there. The few who do all commute south to go to work. The people who work in San Francisco at the faux-tech companies are just building stupid apps by morons for morons, they couldn't do any real programming anyway much less any engineering.
Isn't that because foreign money is buying up property like mad? I remember reading stuff that talked about wealthy Chinese doing it because if they have to flee, they can't stop at a bank. I wouldn't be surprised if other regions of the world were doing it too.
Of course there's no right to stop people from coming to San Francisco and changing the nature of the city and the region. After all, a lot of Irish and Italian families felt the urge to move out of the city when hippies started focusing on San Francisco. But people also have the right to root against the tech companies and those who work for them.
I would love to see a local bust. It's not my right to stop newcomers from renting and buying property, but it's my right to be of the opinion that a lot of newcomers are obnoxious and that the city has changed in ways I don't like. In many ways, San Francisco is becoming a new Manhattan. A bust might make sense economically too. If things are being outsourced to India, why not outsource to other regions of the US. I don't see why coding needs to be so centralized in the Bay Area.
Anyway, 95% of the comments are focusing on a red herring: that this can be legislated away. This is about people rooting for a comeuppance for the tech industry and those who work for it. For all the people saying, "just deal with it," I say the same thing back: "just deal with" a lot of natives and ex-pats rooting against you. It probably won't make a difference but you don't have the "right" to be liked.
Portland is no longer a liveable city. There are 2 reasons: 1) The air is poisonous, much worse than before. The news stories linked below don't discuss all the issues. 2) During all hours of the day there are terrible traffic jams.
The problem with the air is more than pollution, the air is poisonous:
Intel has been emitting fluoride for years without state knowledge, permit. Quote: "When Intel applied for D1X approval, the company considered its fluoride emissions insignificant and did not include those. It was only when the company applied for the new DEQ permit required by greenhouse gas regulations that it requested a 6.4-tons-per-year fluoride emission limit. " 6.4-tons-per-year!!!
Oregon warns home gardeners, Portland leaders lash out at state pollution response. Quote: "Regulators have known for years that Portland has high levels of the heavy metal cadmium in the air, but didn't know until 2015 what the likely sources were." Another quote: "The department's own air monitoring found arsenic levels were 159 times higher than the state's safety goal in Southeast Portland and cadmium levels were 49 times higher."
Portland pollution: How does it affect you? Quote: "Tests detected cadmium and arsenic near Bullseye Glass in Southeast Portland and Uroboros Glass in North Portland. Superheating the metals, which are used to add color to glass, can send small particles up smokestacks and into surrounding air." The next paragraph: "The state also found that another carcinogen, hexavalent chromium, was used by the two plants."
There are now traffic jams most of the day. Yet Portland city management is allowing the construction of large buildings with no parking! One story: New Portland apartment buildings with no parking have neighbors worried about congested streets.
This stuff is self leveling. Anyone who has lived in Silicon Valley for a couple of cycles remember 89, when house values fell through the floor. Didn't recover until late 90s. With the shear number of idiotic startups now, there will be another crash. The workers in SF may find that no one can afford their designer dog treats or $8 special coffees, and they may wish for another boom. At least apartments will be available, and rents could even come down a lot.
SF is a very expensive city, but move east or north aways and you can have a decent life.
Problem is, many want SF AND cheap living. Sorry, you have to wait for the next crash. Don't worry, the people can only support so many restaurant and grocery delivery startups. None made it through the last crash.
Want it messed up permanently? Get the government involved...
Look, the problem is that everyone "tired of living in SF" is moving to PDX in droves. STOP MOVING HERE. STOP IT. We are all out of jobs and housing!! Stay where you are!!! Evictions are rampant, high rise condos sprout up like weeds, neighborhoods are being ruined. You can't imagine the resentment people are feeling towards all the Cali invaders. They will find NO friends here. No, maybe it's not really fair; greedy developers are really the ones to blame, but THEY are still the ones moving here-- STOP DOING IT. Stay where you are and learn to live with it!!!