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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 didn't get in in the good old days of, hell, the 90s, buying is not really an option anymore. A house I was looking at sold for $360k. For a 450sq foot house. Just barely bigger than my apartment.
Rents and Housing are absolutely out of control all over LA, not just SFO. I have no idea how anyone affords it on anything less than tech wages unless they're shacking up with 3 people. What's the point of making good money if you're spending it all on rent?
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
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
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.
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)
Damn Choices! I want a 3500 sq ft home for $150k but I want to live in Silicone valley where you can't buy shit for $150K. There ought to be a law! I demand it!
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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.
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.
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)