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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."
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.'"
That's because Prop 13 distorted the market. Without it, and without rent controls, people who don't need the housing would stop hoarding it because they're grandfathered-in to a below-market deal, making it (counter-intuitively) more affordable for everyone else. Reasonable zoning codes that would allow for an increase in density would help too, of course.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
One problem with advocating for various "rights" is that recognizing "rights" doesn't guarantee a fair or equitable outcome. As long as the conversation remains rooted in trying to declare various "rights" for everyone, you will probably end up with a system in which no completely fair or equitable outcome can be achieved.
By way of example: 20 years ago I moved out of the southern California area to another part of the country so that I could afford to buy a house in a neighborhood in which I could raise a family. I ended up buying a lot in a very quiet, fairly secluded area, then had a house built. I started a family, and life in our quiet secluded neighborhood was good until about 5 years ago when my backyard neighbor sold his house to an individual who turned it into a drug and alcohol rehabilitation clinic. We asked how a business could be introduced to a residential neighborhood, and we were told he had the right to do so because it was a "group home," and the people he was treating had a right to live someplace. Ok, we shrugged and got on with our lives, although the noise from this property was much greater than when a family lived there. Then he bought another house that adjoined both our property and his original property, and added on to his business. Again, he "had the right" because he was helping people who needed help. When he bought the third house (that bordered our property) we decided to move. Not because of the "drug and alcohol" aspect, but because our neighborhood was no longer a neighborhood - we had upwards of 45 people a day driving in and out of our small street, 3 shifts of workers a day, all strangers. We were becoming surrounded by a very profitable business that acts nothing like a "home", which filled our small neighborhood with strangers.
We had "rights", but the people who were being treated also had "rights" and the guy running the business had "rights". All well intended, I'm sure, but the outcome was not fair or equitable, at least as far as we are concerned. Our relocation was traumatic because it wasn't anything we had been prepared for and came at a very inconvenient time for our children's schooling. Balancing various needs resulted in a year-long split between two halves of my family living quite some distance apart, and has seriously hosed-up my completing an advanced degree, but we are now in what we believe to be a much better living situation.
San Francisco and other communities that become overwhelmed by unbalanced economic forces will probably not solve their problems by focusing on "rights." The problems also won't be solved by pointing the finger at people of different political persuasions, either. The solutions will not come quickly, and individuals will need to make decisions for themselves with respect to how long they want to fight versus get on with their lives. And the outcomes won't be "fair and equitable" to everyone. That's life.