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Billionaire Tech Investors Support Divisive Plan To Ban San Francisco's Homeless Camps (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader shares a USA Today report: The images are startling: Homeless men, women and children huddled on the streets of the San Francisco Bay Area -- often in the shadows of start-ups and high-tech behemoths generating billions of dollars in wealth. It's a stark contrast that has gripped the region, and prompted four county measures on the Nov. 8 ballot to generate $3 billion over the next 25 years for affordable housing and services. Under the most-ambitious measure, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee has proposed a 0.75% increase in the sales tax, to 9.5%, to raise $50 million a year. Propositions J and K would generate $1.2 billion for the next quarter-century via a simple majority. "There is clearly not enough affordable housing, or housing at any level," says Kevin Zwick, CEO of Housing Trust Silicon Valley.TechCrunch adds: The debate over what to do about San Francisco's homeless population has been building for awhile among the many startups and residents here. But now tech billionaires Ron Conway, Michael Moritz and well-to-do hedge fund manager William Oberndorf have each thrown about $50,000 behind a measure to rid San Francisco of its homeless tent cities. Other notable investors, including Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's husband and venture capitalist Zach Bogue, have also donated. Bogue reportedly gave about $2,500 to support it.
Are they trying to do a Montgomery Burns impression?
How about a plan that raises taxes on these ultra profitable companies in order to fund the construction of housing for people who can't afford to back a political campaign themselves?
Oh dear, what a bunch of cheapskates. Surely a billionaire can afford more than $50,000. That's the equivalent of a normal person donating maybe $5 to a cause. They might as well have also said to let the homeless eat cake.
How about just take the money and build more damn houses and apartment complexes. Of course, all those people that already have housing in SF don't want their property values to drop or lose the "lifestyle" of living in hip little neighborhoods.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
What is their specific entitlement to live in San Francisco? If someone gave me a free house in the valley, I'd go there too. Until then, I'll keep living and working in the mid-west and putting up with the cold winters.
I live in San Francisco. What I want to ask the Board of Supervisors, and the government entities responsible for this problem is this:
Regardless of how charitable it is as a human duty to take care of displaced and unfortunate people, what is San Francisco's goal and strategy about homeless people? We seem to actively attract homeless people to our city -- because of our policies that seem to say, come one come all, we will take care of you. Or at least we look the other way as they're left to their own devices on the streets, and don't discourage the homeless population. So much so that other states have sent us their homeless in the past.
Is this our strategy? Be the city that actively attracts homeless people to us? Is that our brand, and our role? Are we being deliberate about this problem or just status quo because policymakers in our city are neutered far-left knee-jerk reactionary against anything effective, but which could be perceived as insensitive?
As a result we're flooded with homeless people that you have to step around on your way to work, home, BART, MUNI, etc. And each of us pays a price in the vehicle breakins, stores that have to wash/clean their steps of filth each day, areas of the city that are no-go zones, and higher housing prices in support of people who contribute little to our city. That's a hidden tax that somehow the most liberal sectors of our voting population seems happy to impose on the rest of us, because they don't live close to Civic Center / Tenderloin, SOMA where all this shit happens.
Sometimes, I long for a Rudy Giuliani in the 1990s to clean up our city and take a hard line and be a little insensitive for a change. Not everything should be done through collaboration and feel-good democracy. [/end rant]
t's their own fault for being unemployed because they didn't keep their wages down .
You had a typo in there, I fixed it.
Outlawing poverty doesn't make it cease to exist. This is not the only example of this, but it is curious that San Fran has so many similar issues. A major reason that there are homeless people in San Fran to start with is the insane cost of living which is made by having the minimum mandatory apartment size be high. In general, in the US there has been in the last 100 years a trend for stricter and stricter zoning laws and related laws. And now cities are actively fighting attempts to come up with workable solutions within the legal codes such as microapartments where shared kitchens and other shared spaces http://www.sightline.org/2016/09/06/how-seattle-killed-micro-housing/. Do you want to actually make homeless people go away? Then you need to make cheap housing affordable. How do you do that? By getting rid of the unnecessary zoning rules about height, massive number of parking spaces, large yards, etc.
Entitled? What if you grew up there; lived there all your damn life. People who like moving can go -- and if they have family somewhere they often do. But there are a lot of people who don't like moving. They want to be near their family and their home.
At one time they could live out on a BART line and afford a single one bedroom for under $1k like so many other cities in the US. But that was decades ago. The tech market emerged and created a totally different social environment. Housing sky rocketed and people in normal jobs struggled to make ends meat.
Who are you to say who should and shouldn't live there. And if all the people who couldn't afford to live there left, who exactly is going to work in your coffee shops, your corner stores, drive your buses and man the rail stations? Just because you don't have a fancy-ass tech job means you should have to commute over an hour each day to work shit wages in live in shit overpriced housing?
George Carlin said it best: they call it the America dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.
They claim to be capitalists, but what would they say about getting rid of the restrictions on SROs, aka "flop houses" that you used to see all the time back in the 40s and 50s? Oh NOES! They'd say. That was when we were still living in a somewhat free country. Bring back the cheap flops, that would probably house most of the working homeless.
I live in Frisco. We still have plenty of SROs. In fact, one of the things that the pro-gentrification folks get absolutely up in arms about is that because years ago we entered into a deal with the federal government to get federal money to help support the SROs, the SROs can apparently NEVER be converted into any other form of building unless the federal government says so. Build all the chrome and glass towers you want, that SRO will still be sitting there at the end of the block.
But if you think those SROs house even a tenth of the otherwise-would-be-homeless population in SF, you're kidding yourself. Even the shelters, sponsored by every kind of charitable organization you can think of, don't have a fraction of enough beds.
And yeah, the rest of the Bay Area could maybe do a better job of building SROs and homeless shelters outside of the City, but how would that work, really? A lot of the people who find themselves on the street have real problems. They have mental health issues, they have problems with drug addiction, they have medical problems like diabetes. Is San Leandro going to build free health clinics to handle those issues? Are they going to build drug treatment centers, are they going to hire mental health professionals? On the last one, the answer is plainly no -- we know from experience that what happens to people who suffer schizophrenic episodes in suburban, upper-middle-class areas is that they get thrown in jail and abused, sometimes killed, because there's no infrastructure to treat them.
That's what I don't get about this influx of fuckin dicks who have moved to my City. The only way the economics of dealing with poor people who have medical and mental health issues even start to work is when you have the population density of a major city. A guy living in a tent in San Francisco cannot just up and decide, "Welp, I can take a hint, they don't want me here" and go live in a tent in Castro Valley. If he was lucky, six months from now he'd be locked up on a long-term sentence, if he was unlucky he would be dead. But all these rich assholes, on the other hand ... they can AFFORD to go buy a house in San Ramon! They can afford a car to drive in from Danville or Fremont or Orinda, and when they open the Venetian blinds in the morning they won't ever need to see a poor person! So why can't they go live where the rich people live and let the poor people live in the only model of society that can support them? Why would they spend $2 million on a house that would cost $150,000 in Michigan and then complain that there's garbage everywhere, graffiti on the walls, homeless in the streets, and everything looks like shit? What ... am I meant to be sorry for them because they took a sucker's bet and got suckered?
And, might I add, to you rich assholes, please move along let us people who have both a little money and enough compassion to understand that in this life you're going to have to live ALONGSIDE poor people, let us live in the City, pay our taxes and vote for how they're spent without hearing narcissistic douchebags talking about washing the poor off the streets. You're disgusting and you make this City look even worse than the people you complain about.
Breakfast served all day!
The ignorance is strong in this thread.
You can only live so far from work before the cost and time of commuting are unmanageable.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.