Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
$360k buys you a hell of a house in most of the US.
Get a remote job.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
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.
This is a problem faced by the whole wide world ... 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.
Exactly. Property value has ALWAYS increased near population centers. It has ever been so, and will continue to be.
This has nothing to do with San Francisco specifically. It has happened and continues to happen in every city and every town through all of history.
A central district will have the primary draw where everyone wants to be. A central business district, a big employer, the marketplace, whatever. There are places where people want to be for economic or social opportunities. Location, location, location.
Tools like rent control can "help" for a short time -- in that they make it a little easier for some individuals -- but they cannot stop the reason behind it. Consider the long view. Either demand for the services will drive everyone's wages (and costs) up, or the inability to have workers drive the property values back down as the region enters a decline.
As people are priced out of the market there will be fewer good teachers, meaning worse schools, meaning less draw to the area as it falls to decline. Alternatively, the people will demand quality teachers and increase wages to get them. Fewer service people mean stores and marketplaces can't keep people employed, so either the store workers will leave the area for a better life balance, meaning less draw to the area as it falls to decline, or the demand for shops will mean higher costs so they can pay higher wages.
No matter their wealth, the kings and castles rely on the services of the townsfolk. Either they all grow together or the kingdom declines.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
That's why I don't live there. What I don't understand is why more people don't make that decision. Obviously they see some value in living there, but I question if it is an emotional decision rather than a financial one.
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
If they bought their house for $10k 40 years ago and its with $100million now but they can't afford those taxes, so they have to take their $100 million and go live in a mansion in the second-best part of town, yes I'm okay with that.
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.
That's a common misperception. I make $50,000 per year, put 20% away in savings, rent a studio apartment in Silicon Valley, and most people consider me "poor" because I live a modest lifestyle. Meanwhile, I'm rubbing shoulders with the minimum-wage people on the Express Bus to clean up the same toilets I'm using at work. They may have three or four people under one roof to pay rent and utilities.
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)
It directly does have San Francisco to blame. There are a whole bunch of "Not in my backyarders" who vote down new high capacity housing projects.
Normally when housing prices spike like they have in San Francisco developers will come in an start building new apartments since they can turn a large profit. But the developers currently can't as any proposed projects keep getting turned down.
So while prices in major cities and towns have generally always gone up. Areas like San Francisco are well above the norm. And this isn't accounting for all the foreign investment from China buying up property as quickly as they can which causes prices to jump when lots of places sell above asking price due to bidding wars.
San Francisco is a poorly run city, but that's the business of San Franciscans. There will always be poorly run cities (and other organizations, public or private) in the world. You can't "fix" that.A far better solution is to let cities and states make local choices and force them to live with the consequences of their choices. That way, San Francisco can fail, Fremont can prosper, and people can vote with their feet. If you try to "fix our whole society", you just risk such problems become national and taking away any ability of people to get away from bad government.
What annoys me is the massive state and federal subsidies that flow into San Francisco, to help the poverty and social problems that its misguided policies create, to help it cope with its dysfunctional transportation issues, and to subsidize both its corporations and residents merely for living there. Stop pouring money into SF from the outside, SF prices will drop, and some degree of sanity will be restored.
Shoot the landlords and move the poor in wholesale... Also worked in China.
"Murder the fiscally responsible", love it! And to think some people call SJWs a bit over-the-top!
But waitasec - Doesn't your fear of guns override your desire to take away the incentives for people to bother earning their living?
I agree. Ditto on growing up in the 70s. These young tech think they are entitled just coming out of college. They're not. One poor bastard thought he was God's gift to IT, all cocky, but later on in the interview when it was my turn to ask a few questions, I asked him about operating systems, specifically *nix, since he listed it on his resume and had "expert" after the OS name, which was FreeBSD, which also happens to be an OS I use daily. I asked him about config files like /etc/rc.conf and he had no idea what they were or why he would edit them -- or in this case, even how -- despite having vim listed on his resume (along with joe, ed, and even emac). I asked him how to have vim show line numbers and he had no idea. He had no idea how to do a simple replace in vim or even how to save a file.
Kids, listen up! If you don't actually KNOW stuff, don't include it on your resume/CV. I will call you on it. Some places, like mine, actually REQUIRE you to know *nix and know it beyond installing Ubuntu.
It's going to be really funny when the well paid techies discover there are no schools, no police, and no fire department because nobody doing those jobs could afford to live anywhere near there. Perhaps it will take the next great fire to convince people that the current plan is a total loss.