In San Francisco and Rooting for a Tech Slowdown | Hacker News Reader

In San Francisco and Rooting for a Tech Slowdown

nytimes.com

57 pointsakud98 comments

One of the interesting side-effects of Sen. Fienstien's quest to keep high-rises out of San Francisco is that _all_ real estate is more expensive. There are many people here with similarly narrow ideas about how to protect what is "theirs."

A great example would be the people who throw rocks at Google busses. Everyone on that buss can afford a car and would drive to work alone (maybe carpool) if they didn't have the busses to reduce congestion.

FWIW: A lot of those rock throwers were probably not in bad shape. That is because the real people being hurt were probably working their first or second job at the time that was happening, and didn't have time to throw rocks at buses because they'd get fired for not showing up to work.

Serious question: Who is getting hurt by Google driving people to work on buses. It seems like this reduces congestion, and helps the environment, which is good for everyone. What am I missing here?

The issue was they're using public bus stops. It's not hard to picture why it's demeaning to be standing at the public infrastructure and see a fancy shuttle come and pick up "Google People" while you're left waiting to ride with the proletariat. Especially demeaning when the shuttle is in the way of the real bus.

Imagine if the NYC subway had a special car for Wall Street workers that was much more comfortable.

How is this any different from someone driving a 2017 Lexus versus a 1990 Toyota? Both may be a reflection of the income one receives. Both take up the same public infrastructure of the road and parking spaces.

I'm sorry, but no. Private busses using public bus stops — and blocking public bus traffic — is not an income issue.

Are the private busses in any way holding up public bus service? Is there a serious reported story somewhere establishing this?

SFMTA's most recent evaluation:

https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/projects/2015/Eval...

TL;DR: Of an average of ~3000 "stop events" per day, 2.7%, or 80-ish, resulted in a shuttle blocking MUNI.

Shuttles were also seen to block travel and/or bike lanes in some 35% of their stops.

I don't get your point, but if you park your car in a public bus stop you're an asshole regardless of its value.

You seemed to imply in your original comment that taking the Google bus versus not taking the Google bus boils down to a class issue of "haves" and "have nots", so I was trying to illustrate that no matter what that class distinction would still exist.

If the Wall Street workers paid for it, what would it matter? The sense of entitlement is astounding. Whenever someone drives by in a Ferrari I don't suddenly feel entitled to throw rocks just because they aren't letting me drive it.

Want to ride the Google bus? Get a job at Google. If people studied code with as much interest as they study the Kardashians, perhaps more could move up the ladder.

The solution is that everyone at Google should drive their cars one day per week to simply illustrate the value of the Google bus. Perhaps all those workers could just stop buying things for a week and see how badly those people wish they were back.

"If people studied code with as much interest as they study the Kardashians, perhaps more could move up the ladder."

It's really hard to see why people hate techies in SF isn't it?

The point isn't the existence of the shuttle, it's the freeloading on public infrastructure. Google was removing paying transit riders while using public transit infrastructure and inconveniencing the public. Oh and rent near a Google shuttle stop suddenly surged because of demand from Google employees. Quite literally a recipe for creating discontent in a neighborhood.

Google got the message and made a large donation, but like most things the damage was easy to make and hard to recover from.

And the solution is simple--Google (and any other company running a shuttle that uses public stops) should pay for what its using.

SF Muni is subsidized and severely overloaded. Taking some riders away doesn't hurt the system, it helps it cope.

If BART somehow ran a subway out to those neighborhoods, the rent there would be even higher. Having a reliable transit system is a very valuable amenity that most of the city lacks.

I get that it may be demeaning but that analogy doesn't really work. It would be like the NYC Subway didn't go to Wall Street at all, and the banks built their own subway for their workers which ran from an NYC Subway station.

In that respect — traffic congestion — I think the buses are a good thing. But there's definitely a down-side.

Gentrification, for example, though usually regarded as a net, long-term win, is short-term very painful for many people. Families that have lived somewhere for years, and communities that have grown up over generations, are being shredded as property-owners rent-seek.

Now, yes, it's their property to do with as they will (subject to their remaining in compliance with the law), but I will continue to point out that there are some very interesting discussions to be had in the areas where the sets "things that are legal" and "things that are moral" don't intersect.

I was on a date with a woman — a high school teacher — Sunday night who lives in a rent controlled building in the Mission. (Aside: I'm not looking to start a debate over rent control, so please don't go there.) She told me that her landlord has been delaying depositing her rent checks until after their due date, in order to "establish" a pattern of habitual late-payment, which, presumably, he hopes to use in some later eviction action.

Does that kind of behavior — apparently increasingly common — qualify as hurting people? Because, if her landlord were able to kick (or buy) her out, he would be raising the rent on her apartment by over $4000/month, based on the price her new neighbors are paying for an identical unit (again, please don't turn this into a debate over rent control), and pretty much the only people who can afford that are making Silly Valley tech salaries — and probably doing so with roommates, at that.

A teacher, who teaches the children of San Franciscans, certainly can't afford ~$6000/month, not at SFUSD pay, so let's favor a couple of kids who work in Mountain View or Palo Alto, and have no expenses except rent and leisure activities? How does that make sense, again?

Maybe teachers shouldn't take jobs in areas they can't afford. Serious point. The market would then have to raise the prices for that labor due to the shortage until the rate equals the amount a teacher would need to afford the area.

But the real issue is that supply and demand is distorted in the area: no new supply, increasing demand. It doesn't take an engineer to see where that equation leads. Add rent control on top of that and you have modern San Francisco.

Time to open the floodgates and build. What would be wrong with Korea style 60 story housing? The problem is that people want quaint B&B style neighborhoods yet they complain about everyone wanting to live there; rather than addressing the supply issue, they want to address the demand issue. You can't even replace a toilet without having to go through regulatory and permitting hell.

I am not sure what people in San Fran actually want. It seems like they want an amazing place that's affordable while lamenting that everyone else wants to live there too.

I do take some comfort in the fact that this is one thing that can't be blamed on Republicans.

But there are many groups of people involved. Not everyone angry at tech workers, or at rising costs of living, are also anti-more housing. That's completely nonsensical. There are many people in San Fran and there are many different agendas.

California law assumes the rent was paid on the date of the postmark on the envelope, though she may need to send it be certified mail to prove that.

I'm guessing it's just hostility towards high-tech people in general.

My old Honda Civic eventually died one day. I had to take it to the scrapyard, fixing it would have cost thousands of dollars. The old guy at the scrapyard gave me a good look and said something like "so, you guys went public today, eh?" I could tell he was not in good shape (financially or otherwise), and he had some level of resentment towards what he perceived as entitled tech workers addicted to "easy money".

I didn't even try to explain that I'm by no means rich, I had to scrap the car because it was solidly dead, and yes, I was going to get a new car, but it was going to be a Civic, just like the old one. Not a Lamborghini. But there was a divide there, a whole set of wrong assumptions, that didn't seem I could bridge in a few minutes of conversation.

There are a whole lot of people in this area who are scraping by on tiny wages, and a lot of them don't think very highly of the high tech industry.

From what i can tell, they see it as symbolic of tech people "taking over".

For the nth time, it's not really about that. It's politics. It was an effective symbol for tenants rights activists to latch onto to get attention for eviction protections, which weren't going to momentum otherwise without a nice, sexy controversial symbol that would attract national media.

Or they have plenty of time to throw rocks at buses because they can't find work at all.

I mean, yeah, throwing rocks is stupid and useless and counterproductive as a protest strategy, but declaring that protestors can't be victims and victims can't be protestors seems like a convenient Catch-22 for dismissing anything anyone says.

Edit: Tell me why I'm wrong, please.

The city can't support the 30k cars that would be needed for the people taking tech busses (no room to park that many cars).. so if we stopped the tech busses some of those people would move closer to work without busses; others would take Caltrain. Both of those things would reduce congestion, and pollution more than tech busses.

We don't know the exact number that this would reduce because the tech bus legislation passed without the environmental study that is required (hence why there is a lawsuit right now).

That's a major assumption to make. Plenty of people who work in the South Bay or East Bay without access to a tech bus already drive.

What you just said is that it would increase congestion to the point where they would move closer to work. They wouldn't move closer to work if they could still drive their cars to work. They can't drive to cars to work because there are no busses and there is massive congestion.

When I lived in SF, the categorical hate towards tech workers (I was not a tech worker back then) was nothing like "mainstream". It was just a few extremists, a few protesters I might see in the news. I didn't actually know anyone like that. Journalists made it sound like a bigger thing than it was.

It's been over 3 years though. Has the anti-tech-worker hate really gone mainstream or are journalists continuing to inflate it?

Journalists continue to inflate it. I actually think folks are coming around more and more to work with tech vs. categorically fighting against it. I think people have begun to see the systemic problems and work together on those.

Then again I did encounter a guy riding his bike around Market St. the other day screaming "Kill the Techies." But that's once in 5 years.

I actually gave an interview to a reporter for NPR recently. I work for a major tech company. Here's what I told him:

I don't feel the hatred, and I think reports of it are either from areas where I haven't been in (so single events that I missed) or it's not actually a problem.

All of his questions were leading questions into people hating on tech workers. I hang out with people of middle class, both upper and lower, go work occasionally with poorer people, and have rubbed my shoulders with a couple richer tech elite. I feel like the chances are I would've experienced the hatred.

So either I'm missing out on a lot (I don't think I am..) or they're overblown.

I lived there for the last 3 years. When I got there it was a thing but not huge. By the time I left I would definitely consider it mainstream.

Tech workers are not to blame, but tech workers shouldn't blame those angry at getting priced out, either. Instead, both groups should work together to lobby for more housing.

So the question is, how can a hacker help?

>how can a hacker help?

Help make remote work more possible and acceptable.

This this THIS! I live on two acres in the South of France. If I couldn't work remotely I'd be in San Francisco like the rest. So my three kids go to a small village school, I rarely drive the car and I paid as much for my place as I would have an apartment in San Fran.

I think people will be shocked by how little housing prices decrease if the startup economy experiences a downturn.

Absolutely. Housing prices are like wages: very "sticky." Nobody wants to ever sell a house at a loss or drop their rent, so housing will sit idle on the market rather than take a write-down.

The only way housing could conceivably fall (without intense depression-level pain) is if the entire rest of the economy inflated such that housing was reasonable. Everyone would be making six figures, a gallon of gas would be $6, a loaf of bread over $10, but housing would be reasonable again.

> Absolutely. Housing prices are like wages: very "sticky." Nobody wants to ever sell a house at a loss or drop their rent, so housing will sit idle on the market rather than take a write-down.

Depends on how financially solvent you are to manage the upkeep (Principle, interest, prop tax, insurance) if your wages drop or you lose your job.

Yes, right. Housing can never fall. I've heard that one before.

Demand has greatly outstripped supply in the bay area. Even with a moderate reduction in demand prices may still rise.

http://blog.altosresearch.com/how-sustainable-are-the-exorbi...

Housing fell a little bit off the 2005 highs and the result was very nearly a total collapse of the financial system. The Fed and the government did everything they could to backstop housing (at the expense of housing affordability and banking system reform) and it's now permanently unaffordable.

More accurately we could say that housing will never be allowed to fall. The entire economy will be sacrificed at the altar of home values. Homeowners vote more than non-homeowners, and so much investment capital is tied up in housing that a major fall in home values would destroy the financial system.

This chart for housing prices in San Jose fell off more than "a little bit."

http://www.zillow.com/san-jose-ca/home-values/

There was a dip, sure, but that's not what I meant. There was no lasting correction.

Problem is, all those housing bullets have already been shot dealing with the last housing mess. Good luck next time.

Now if China continues to slow down and can manage capital controls better, then you're going to see housing fall back to Earth a bit.

I question the author's fact-checking abilities when the article starts with the statement "the city officially gave the shuttles free rein to use public bus stops". Actually, the shuttles can only use 200 out of 2500+ muni stops and have a plethora of other restrictions. That doesn't seem like "free rein" to me.

See https://www.sfmta.com/projects-planning/projects/commuter-sh... for full program details, and http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/San-Francisco-Muni-Appr... for a reference on the "200 out of 2500" statistic.

That just tells me the author most likely is in favor of making the tech companies look bad even if it means distorting the truth.

The overall gist of this article to me seems like a similar SF argument: let's keep the city the way it was. Let's not build more housing, let's not build up, let's not move forward into the future.

Obviously, this isn't how a city moves forward and grows.

Peskin is not necessarily a bad guy.. I agree with him on some things, but neighborhood preservation is not one. It's easy to single out tech in all of this, but the prior non-tech landlords have a lot of blame on this. Sure, market dictates pricing and the large tech community has been willing to let the prices go up. (Mind you, this isn't just real estate, but also food.) But, I feel like, as someone in tech not able to afford buying _today_, I'd rather have the city moving forward vs. stagnant just so another group of people can live here.

I appreciate diversity and my wife and I have talked for a few years of where else we should move to. Portland? Seattle? Austin? But, SF seems to have the right mix of diversity (more or less), compact city-ness (like NYC), close to a lot of great outdoors, and a lot of other things. We just keep coming back to SF has pretty much all the boxes checked off for us, even if it's in this crazy inflated market right now.

Nothing lasts forever and we will probably get some kind of housing correction. But look a look back historically will show that you can't buy a house anywhere (at least in the bay area) for $20k, like our parents did. To think that things should stand still and stay fixed is just ignoring how reality works for cities that keep growing..

Maybe this will all go away once we have no need for money like in Star Trek. But today, this isn't the case.

The idea that "the future" is a megapolis that needs to be built up really needs to be defended a bit more. Historically, the dense megapolis has been the future, but that might have just be an accident of technology's evolution. Why can't Earth be densely covered with smallish cities like current Berkeley and San Francisco?

Very few people who are being remotely rational disagree that techs relationship with San Francisco couldn't be improved. That said, relying on rental prices to justify an argument that tech is the root cause of the issues and ignoring that the only adequate solution - building more housing - is primarily opposed by exactly the same people is the height of hypocrisy.

How about: let's root for interest rates to go up by 5 percentage points or so.

I can't stand obstructionist politicians, but I also don't buy the argument that SF is not 'moving forward'. It's also building a significant amount of housing and getting over its fear of heights. There are 3 districts in SF getting significant up zoning. This is what SF's downtown will look like in 3 years:

http://i.imgur.com/mcJf5zK.jpg

Agree with a lot of this, but it seems odd that parents are worried about children getting hit by a bus. Are there not school bus stops in front of every school?

i think a viable solution would be to look at internal structures of companies and really find out teams and departments that could function from a remote location. It could be tech or product or even HR. And move them to different office locations distributed at a wider spread to avoid one epicenter for influx of population.. Not sure if some company tried thinking in this way..

The non-tech parts of this town will be devastated by a tech slowdown. Absolutely destroyed.

How's that? They seemed to be OK before the crazy upswing.

Because that was before, obviously. Too much of the city relies on the tech economy now - the restaurants, the lyft/uber drivers, the building contractors, the dog walkers, the private school teachers.

But it transitioned towards a reliance on tech before now, there's nothing to suggest it cannot transition away to something else.

Biotech? Genentech will still be in South SF.

It certainly can and will. But not quickly, and with lot of suffering in the interim.

The relative power structure won't meaningfully shift. Levels will just change. The guy whose 1% of this pie is meaningful today may find that it is unsustainable tomorrow. The gal who lives richly on her 10% of the pie may have to tighten a belt or two tomorrow, but it's unlikely to become be existential. More tangibly, city services will pull away from non-core areas, projects and services.

I would argue that despite budget increases we have not seen an appreciable increase in operating service levels across the board - from transit to infrastructure to homeless outreach and everything in between. Hard to believe with a $9B (yes, billion) budget. [1]

(Yes, there are capital expenditures happening that are quite visible but do we really need an extension of the slow T-line to Fishermans Wharf?)

[1] - http://sfmayor.org/ftp/uploadedfiles/mayor/budget/SF_Budget_...

Well, I think the ones that were around before the tech influx will certainly be able to ride out slower times better than the restaurants/services that have come up as a direct result of the influx of tech folk.

All the folks working in a service industry that exists only to service tech workers are going to have a very, very hard time.

Q: How many sandwiches and burritos must one deliver to pay rent in the Bay Area? How many of those people that have been requesting said sandwiches and burritos will be laid off, move away or reduce discretionary spending?

A: many.

I think this sentiment is exactly what gives tech workers a bad name:

> All the folks working in a service industry that exists only to service tech workers are going to have a very, very hard time.

"Only to service tech workers" - are you kidding? You sound like the aristocracy from Downton Abbey: "Thank god we exist to give all the peasants jobs to do."

For real. What companies do people even refer to when they say "service industry that only exists to serve tech workers"? DoorDash and TaskRabbit and the other outsource your chores apps? The service industry and its workers will be just fine without them.

> The service industry and its workers will be just fine without them.

If anything, the service industry would arguably be better without them, instead of service startups attempting to illegally classify workers as 1099 contractors in order to be more attractive financially to VCs expecting insane growth.

I like to call this the 'plantation owner defense'. Any mistreatment of other peoples can be justified by 'but they would be even WORSE without us.' The original plantation owner justification being that the 'workers' (ha, euphemism!) were wild savages in a wild land, and any kind of treatment they were put through HAD to be better than what they would otherwise go through.

The other place I've seen this defense used regularly is in South Asia. People treat their servants and house workers really poorly there, and then the defense is 'sureee, they may be given the same food as we give our dogs and cats, but they would be DYINGGG of thirst and hunger in their villages without us.' Fortunately for most South Asians, more and more people are getting out of the situation where they are pretty much bonded laborers.

It seems to me that things are going in the opposite direction in the US. I have a lot to thank the US for personally, but sometimes, I get this intense emotion of schadenfreude. The increasing wealth gap, the increasing racial hostilities, outright hate for anyone who doesn't happen to be in the 'in-group'. As an American, I would be terribly terrified. As a non American I am sometimes all 'HAA, you acted if you were above everything else, as if you were post-history. Now YOU bear the baggage of history the others have had to overcome'.

My favorite are the techie-engineer-objective types. The HN Bros. I've been told over and over and over again how "history is over" and "nothing in history matters anymore because technology" and "context doesn't matter because not we have the means to establish absolute truth". Like literally. When you value technology over people, the process over the end goal, things will break. And they seem to be breaking. I am secretly glad, even though I am myself a part of this env, and might lose my livelihood too if things go South.

...Relevant to the article because it was meant to reflect how things seem to be for people outside the core bubble.

Strangely enough, San Francisco was thriving 100 years before the computer chip even existed.

Don't overestimate your importance. The world will move on without you.

Thriving? I think reasonable people disagree.

The vast majority of people i've talked to think SF was a craphole 25 years ago. I think a lot of people have the golden age fallacy going on :)

I see you know absolutely nothing about the history of San Francisco.

So you don't think reasonable people can disagree about the quality of san francisco 25 years ago?

Interesting. It's good to know it's an objective fact with only one possible answer.

The vast majority of people i've talked to think SF was a craphole 25 years ago.

Let's see, I've been in the area for 40 years and your comment couldn't be more wrong or uninformed.

Given it's an opinion, based on a lot of data, i don't see how you can think it can be uninformed.

You are welcome to disagree with it of course.

But, again, based on what i have, i suspect you may be in the minority.

Time will tell, of course!

If you have data on your side, let's see it.

Errr, i already said it's from talking to many people (~100-200 over the course of the year) who have lived there a very long time (in most cases, 30+ years). Given i stated an aggregation of what their responses were, that's valid data. Not sure what more you want here.

It seems you just violently disagree, but that doesn't make you right. It just makes you a data point in the other direction.

Here's Bill Wyman's old Salon piece on it; it represents 17 years, but he grew up in East Bay in the 80s.

http://www.salon.com/1999/11/03/sf/

(I remember it because I had just moved to SF from Chicago, again, when it was published).

Your condescension is as misplaced as your argument, which is a truism verging on non-sequitar.

Cool. So you'll have no problem proving me wrong.

Do so.

Devested with it, devastated without it. In summary it sucks to be on the lower rung of the economy.

The more devastation there is, the less of everything else there will be to go around. A tech downturn will just add to the misery.

For the love of God, move your company somewhere else. You don't have "easy access to capital" as an excuse anymore. You could locate literally anywhere. Stop coming here. Thank you.

Terrible public transit. A lifeless housing policy that's out of touch with local needs. Police rousting people out of one homeless encampment and then the same people just setting up a new camp a few blocks away. Racially charged police shootings.

And the problem is workers at tech companies.

San Francisco is one massive "tech slowdown" (although I suppose more like a tech collapse, given the baseline level of employment further down in Silicon Valley) from turning into Detroit-on-the-Bay.

As long as the weather doesn't change, SF will be fine.

The world is full of places with great weather & horrible governance.

That's some very wishful thinking. You have rich people like Robin Williams or Michelle Pfeiffer living here unlike Detroit, not to name countless CEOs and retired VCs who wont disappear.

As for the rest of us plebs, SF has survived many boom and bust cycles [0], unlike Detroit.

[0] http://sfist.com/2015/10/07/san_francisco_has_always_been_a_...

There were rich people living in Detroit, until they moved to Grosse Point and such. Is San Francisco, the geographic-political entity, that attractive that people wouldn't move 10 miles to Daly City or Burlingame to escape the SF municipal government?

The answer to that question is certainly yes.

Please stop posting this drivel. It's like listening to a broken record. Shut. Up.

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