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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?
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.
Or to paraphrase the famous quote, "If they cannot afford apartments in San Francisco, they should just move to their summer homes in the Hamptons...."
I think the phrase you're looking for is "completely out of touch".
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
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.
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.”
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.