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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.
These "tech" billionaires made their billions by exploiting the community-built Linux project. Now they want to destroy communities. The community should strike back by banning use of Linux for commercial purposes. Oh no! The free software license can't be revoked. The free software movement enabled "tech" billionaires, see now how the free software movement has backfired.
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]
The summary could mean two quite distinct things (I had to click the article to find out which).
1) Rich people don't like seeing homeless people and want to help them (unlikely).
or
2) Rich people don't like seeing homeless people and don't want to have to see them (more likely)
Unfortunately, it's number 2. They want to move the problem away from them so that it becomes someone else's problem.
That obviously does not help anything other than furthering class divides.
(I live in the next most similar place to SF in terms of ridiculous high housing costs, class divides, and lots and lots of homeless people - that is, Vancouver BC, Canada).
Moving homeless people around helps nothing at all, and only makes things worse.
SF gets the attention, but the whole BA has homeless. When you look at that larger picture, you realize the arguments about not having enough space aren't up to snuff. Water rights arguments would make more sense--except that it hasn't stopped development during boom times. No, it's really just that the equilibrium price of housing is too much, so you get working homeless/van dwellers, couch surfers, etc. Then of course there are the mentally ill homeless who want help and aren't really getting it, and then finally the hard core of mentally ill and/or obstinate people who are really hard to move off the streets.
Anyway, I digress. The solution needs to involve the whole BA, not just SF, and these guys aren't helping. 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. Ditto for RV/trailer parks. That would be an affordable option for most working homeless, and it might even make the non-working homeless realize that it's worth cleaning up and flipping burgers so they can flop.
The mentally ill problem is a whole different ball game, and not enough time to rant here... but hey you big capitalists, until we actually have some REAL CAPITALISM, why don't you just stuff it?
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.
.. and this is exactly the problem.
The whole housing shortage in the bay area is entirely self-created. If the city would allow developers to come in downtown and build a few giant condo buildings they would do so in a heartbeat, because the market is obviously red hot. But the city does not want to allow the market to solve the problem.
This is exactly the problem. Prices are a fairly straightforward function of supply and demand. Even look beyond the homeless in the city to other towns, such as San Jose around Tully/101/280. Go driving around those neighborhoods in the evenings and you see cars parked absolutely everywhere: lawns, sideyards, crammed and jammed up into garages and driveways and sidewalks, and of course good luck ever finding a spot on the street. Because San Jose, like San Francisco and the rest of the SF Bay Area, doesn't want to allow enough new residential units to be built each year, the supply of housing ends going only towards the wealthy or those who have a home and can afford to re-fi and use the cash as a downpayment. The rest, including the "working class,", have got nowhere to go because developers all but stopped investment in building anything they can even afford to rent, unless with a large group of strangers.
The better solution is don't "take" the money, just let developers choose how many units they want to invest in and they will remedy the problem, profitably, without stealing anyone's money.
I am really hoping the measure fails because the SF Bay Area has a pathetic history of wasting money on similar efforts (VTA doesn't go to SJC or connect to BART, there is a train that goes from Novato to Petaluma WTF) and the officials need to not have such a convenient cop-out every time this issue gets brought up. What is happening right now is a caste is forming with the landowners becoming a smaller percentage, huge swaths of the population being crammed into miserable housing that eats up all of their income, and I'm not sure this has a happy ending.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
Robin Hood returned taxes to the taxed.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
Or you could, you know, simply allow some developers to come in and build some decent high rises in this city, thus loosening the market for quality real estate and in tandem causing rents across the board to drop. But no, that is too easy.
Blame Zoning, Not Tech, for San Francisco's Housing Crisis
http://www.citylab.com/housing...
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/...
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.
The billionaires respond:
[Ron] Conway initially declined to comment but wrote back pointing out he’d been involved in projects to help the city’s homeless before and telling TechCrunch, “Prop Q only allows for encampment removal when real housing or shelter is offered and that’s why I support it. It’s not healthy or compassionate to let human beings suffer in tent cities and we shouldn’t allow it when there’s real housing, shelter and supportive services we can provide for people instead.”
[Zach] Bogue, who served on the board of the Bay Area homeless outreach organization the Tipping Point for the last several years, said he supported the proposition “because it would provide more resources to help get the homeless off the street and into sheltersThe encampments are unsafe and inhumane, and frankly, I hope that this is not our solution to homelessness in the city.”
Speaking on behalf of [Michael] Moritz, Nathan Ballard, spokesman for the campaign to support Proposition Q said it was, “inhumane to allow people to live on the street when shelter is available. Mr. Mortiz and Mr. Conway have joined San Franciscans from all walks of life who support Prop Q because they urgently want to see an end to the human suffering on our streets.”
Build on what? A fair amount of San Francisco is built on the rubble that was pushed into the bay after it was leveled by an earthquake a century ago. It physically is unsound to build anything all that big on it.
> Entitled? What if you grew up there; lived there all
> your damn life.
Actually, what's going on is that other states are "dumping" their homeless on California in general, and San Francisco and San Diego in particular (LA used to be a popular one too, but they engaged in their own anti-dumping battle a while back when "skid row" became unmanageable.). Most recently, Nevada was caught red-handed shuffling their mental patients off to California with one-way Greyhound tickets:
http://www.motherjones.com/moj...
https://thinkprogress.org/neva...
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/...
http://www.nbcsandiego.com/new...
Im not sure what the solution is. But the reality is that there really is a metric crapton of unpopulated land in the US where people could be housed cheaply. It's hard to believe until you do a decent amount of cross-country travel. But I've flown from SF to Kansas a number of times for work these last few years. And, aside from Denver, there's very little in-between. And, for that matter, Kansas has all of one city of any note; and they share that one with Missouri. The rest is a whole lot of nothing. It's kind of ironic that it's Nevada that was caught doing the most recent round of bussing; because they're one of the states with the most empty land.
I hear this argument a lot, and it's insane to me that people -- even our own politicians -- can't get the idea into their heads that San Francisco is not, and cannot be, Manhattan.
Where is the rest of the infrastructure going to come from to support all the people living in the high rise apartments you propose? Come to San Francisco and look around. The BART train system is already crumbling under its own weight, serving something like 100 times as many people as it was designed to. Buses on major commute lines are packed wall to wall and crawl through the streets. Traffic is choked on the bridges. Where is the water infrastructure going to come from for all this new housing, where will we put the sewers? How much will it cost taxpayers to run power to all of these new buildings? If the idea is to house families, where will their children go to school? Are we going to build high-rise schools, too? Who will pay for that? And where will we find qualified teachers to staff them, when they'll need to commute more than an hour each way because I guarantee you none of these supposed new housing units will meet a teacher's definition of "affordable." And how will our fire departments serve buildings that are higher than their equipment has ever needed to serve? Where will the police come from to protect all these new people? How will the courts handle all the new cases, criminal and civil? For that matter, who will feed all these people? I've heard stories of waiters who have been fired from their last three jobs in a row landing a new job in under 48 hours, because already that's how desperate the hiring situation for service jobs is, because nobody who works a service job can afford to live here. You're going to see San Francisco burrito shops closing up because nobody can live on a burrito-roller's salary, soon, and high-rise housing won't change that.
You believe that crap about building up, I say you've been hornswoggled. Our city government has been chanting, "Build! Build! Build!" for the last two decades but it has nothing to do with making residents' lives more affordable or even bearable. It's about extracting as much wealth from the developers as possible, full stop. San Francisco is a machine for transferring wealth from developers' pockets into the pockets of politicians and their cronies. It's a real shame, because this used to be a beautiful city, but that's all it is now.
Breakfast served all day!
Update: Conway initially declined to comment but wrote back pointing out he'd been involved in projects to help the city's homeless before and telling TechCrunch, "Prop Q only allows for encampment removal when real housing or shelter is offered and that's why I support it. It's not healthy or compassionate to let human beings suffer in tent cities and we shouldn't allow it when there's real housing, shelter and supportive services we can provide for people instead."
Bogue, who served on the board of the Bay Area homeless outreach organization the Tipping Point for the last several years, said he supported the proposition "because it would provide more resources to help get the homeless off the street and into sheltersâ¦The encampments are unsafe and inhumane, and frankly, I hope that this is not our solution to homelessness in the city."
Speaking on behalf of Moritz, Nathan Ballard, spokesman for the campaign to support Proposition Q said it was, âoeinhumane to allow people to live on the street when shelter is available. Mr. Mortiz and Mr. Conway have joined San Franciscans from all walks of life who support Prop Q because they urgently want to see an end to the human suffering on our streets."
Anyone homeless needs to be offered reliable shelter, food, medicine, clothes
It's been tried. And with the food, shelter, etc. usually come rules of conduct. No thanks say the heroin addicts and people with mental problems. They live under the freeway off-ramps because the rules most closely match their lifestyle. To be precise: none.
and a plan to get out of their predicament towards a productive lifestyle.
They are happy with the lifestyle that they have. Want to give them some handouts? Fine, thanks. But that isn't going towards a better lifestyle. Sometimes it isn't even going toward food. Gotta have that meth or cheap booze.
We had a program in Seattle some years ago that involved participating businesses to accept meal coupons which the public could buy and hand to the cardboard sign guys. It didn't work, unless you actually liked being screamed at by winos for not handing out cash.
Have gnu, will travel.
Most of SF and Oakland, and all surrounding areas all have significant liquefaction risk. http://geomaps.wr.usgs.gov/sfg...
How many of the homeless people they want to hide are homeless because one of these people had to keep a share price up and made a bunch of cuts?
It's called capitalism. Supply and demand. That's America. Normal people move when they can't find work where they are. It happened in a massive way in the 2008 recession. There are 1 bedroom apartments starting at $700/mo in Detroit's city center - within walking distance from startup incubators, #20 on the Global Fortune 500, General Motors, and the nations 3rd largest mortgage originator, Quicken Loans just to name a few. Maybe try Dearborn, MI I think Ford employs a few people too. There is even cheaper housing in suburban (2br home for $875/mo) and rural areas ($550/mo). Take your pick. There are lots of places with cheap real estate and good jobs. It's unfortunate that homeless people are spoiled with the beautiful climate and endless handouts in California.
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.
Replace "city" in what you wrote with "NIMBYs" and then it will be correct. City residents that already have their own home don't want more housing built. They're under the delusion that if they just stick to their guns, everybody else will eventually give up and stop moving here so SF can go back to the little town it once was.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.