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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.
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.'"
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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The best reason to be wary of Austin is traffic. The city has seen tremendous growth over the last decade and their transit system is inadequate and hard to fix.
The second best reason is because the state politics are bonkers (California's politics are crazy in a different way).
Still, Austin's a very nice city in a lot of ways.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
When they learn I'm an old school mainframe programmer, their eyes glass over.
When I was a lead video game tester, I shocked the new testers out of high school by informing them that I played video games in the early 1980's (most are surprised to learn that video games existed before the Sony PlayStation), introduced them to a tester who assembled arcade machines for Atari and Midway in the 1980's, and to another tester who tested pen-and-paper games in the 1970's. It's always important to instruct youngster to respect their elders.
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).
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.
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)
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"
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?
Seems like too many young people don't respect their elders. When I was kid in the 1970's, I had to be silent in the presence of my grandparents who expected children to be seen but not heard. Since my current job involves working with ex-military people, respect is expected all around. Never know when retired brass might be in the office.
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.
He had no idea how to do a simple replace in vim or even how to save a file.
Did he know how to Google? I know a lot of stuff in general but I don't always know the particular details. I'm often assigned unsolvable problems at work because I can almost always find a solution through a web search. Or, if I didn't find a solution, no one else would either.
Some places, like mine, actually REQUIRE you to know *nix and know it beyond installing Ubuntu.
As an engineer once told me on my internship in 1997: "Installing Linux is not the same as knowing Linux." Back then nothing worked out of the box. Compiling the kernel and device drivers was a necessary evil. Something most kids don't even know how to do.
I was somewhat alarmed by this young candidate, because he emerged from a prominent 4-year institution with a CS degree, yet knew nothing useful about vim or *nix.
When I worked at the Google help desk in 2008, I had to walk a newly hired university graduate the process of turning on his own computer — "Please press the power button. If the computer doesn't explode, you may login into Windows." — since the university computer labs always had someone standing around to turn on the computers. It was a hard lesson for him to learn on his first day of the job.