The Bay Area Is Separating into Red and Green Zones | Hacker News Reader

The Bay Area Is Separating into Red and Green Zones

danielmiessler.com

65 pointsMagicAndi56 comments

I have no idea what this article was about. Let's see. Somehow this individual drives from San Francisco to San Mateo and considers everything in between poor? Perhaps he should venture a little bit more ? How about driving around 280, Hillsborough, Burlingame, Milbrae up in the hills ? All of these are beautiful neighborhoods with houses > $2mn. Not sure what he is talking about. Somehow, he thinks the "stuff on water" is in San Mateo. It is actually Foster City.

Then he drives south from San Mateo down south and until he reaches Palo Alto, he thinks everything is working class poor. Interesting, because between San Mateo and Palo Alto you have Belmont, Redwood City, San Carlos, Atherton, and Menlo Park. Anybody who believes only working class poor lives in these cities, not sure how to take them seriously.

Then this person believes whole of San Jose is a slum. Obviously never been to Evergreen or the myriad of other neighborhoods in San Jose. Then he thinks Fremont has "promise". I actually live in Fremont and not sure if there is a working class neighborhood in Fremont. Fremont has beautiful parks and lakes and great schools.

Ok, Hayward and Oakland are bit rundown. But even Hayward Hills and Oakland Hills are amazing places to live.

My guess - this person drove down El Camino real in the Peninsula and concluded everything by driving down one street.

He also makes an incredible claim - only 2-3% have salaries that let them live comfortably. Others are working on 2-3 jobs. I guess people are working on 2-3 jobs and paying millions for their houses.

What a terrible article.

Completely agree with you. I grew up in the East Bay and to say much of the East Bay is extremely poor is rediculous. Sure Oakland and Richmond are struggling but there are numerous cities that are not (Walnut Creek, Orinda, Danville, Pleasanton, etc).

The whole article sounded like "Oh, my god, you don't have a brand new Tesla parked in the driveway of your beautiful single-family home in the middle of Palo Alto? I'm so sorry for how poor you are!! No high end bookstores and artisanal coffee shops? My word, how dreadful!" In reality, most of the places he described as "red zone" are far, far better than a great deal of the rest of the country. Go visit some run-down Rust Belt cities and tell me you still think San Jose is dilapidated.

Most of the country is not a part of the absolute boom and resulting cornucopia of wealth that tech is experiencing. When you go out to the smaller cities and away from the high powered tech areas you really do see the massive disparity of opportunity that exists currently. You aren't seeing a bad area you are seeing the normal state of most of the country and I know personally I have become accustomed to my environment so I really do feel upset or sad seeing areas where people just plain do not have access to the same things we do. Not sure how to fix it, if you look at it from a financial perspective if you take the majority of the wealth from the upper middle and upper class and distribute it wouldn't make any difference.

Hayward Hills is indeed nice. If you're in the 1% of millenial earners you can stretch and pay close to a million dollars to live in a 2200 sq ft home within spitting distance of the most dangerous fault in America. Or cross 880 to the west and save a little money, but you're in a liquefaction zone now.

Sorry this is a bit off topic & earthquake risk is everywhere in the bay. But this morning I'm a salty house-hunter.

As another salty house-hunter looking around Hayward for the last couple months, you have my sympathies.

What are you looking at for liquefaction risk? I'm not seeing much on this map:

http://gis.abag.ca.gov/website/Hazards/?hlyr=liqSusceptibili...

some parts of the two brown splotches south of the Oakland airport are in Hayward. Basically the area around highway 92 / San Mateo bridge, west of 880

Assuming I'm looking at the same thing, it seems like the part relevant to house hunting would be a small area roughly between Grant Ave and Lewelling, which is technically a bit north of Hayward, split between San Lorenzo and San Leandro.

There is also the park/bird sanctuary/landfill near Winton, but that's not residential.

Trust me it is. Source: the builder of a new construction house I'm looking at.

Agreed. I grew up in the Walnut Creek/Alamo/Danville corridor, and this article feels way off the mark.

> Heading north from Fremont is basically sadness. Hayward, Oakland, San Leandro, Richmond, Vallejo. They’re all poverty stricken and broken.

If you're driving along the freeway looking out the window, I could see how you might think this. Surprise - people that have any amount of money don't want to live within hearing distance of a freeway. Most of the spaces slightly further away are fine. I have friends in the Oakland Hills along 13; perfectly respectable area. Those friends have parents out near Richmond - lots of typical older middle class housing from the 50s.

> The only green zones I see out in that area are maybe in Dublin, Pleasanton, Moraga, etc., but I honestly don’t know much about those areas because I seldom get out there.

I do get out there, and most of Alameda county away from the edge of the bay is comfortably upper-middle class (Dublin/Pleasanton/Fremont/Livermore; Hayward/Castro Valley/San Leandro feel more middle class with upper-middle surroundings + urban gentrification starting to take hold). I have friends out in Stockton; they have a comfortably middle-class house, as do their parents (though on the whole I've seen less of Stockton than I have of the Bay).

I could go on (grandparents in Orinda, an uncle in Fremont, friends scattered through SF, SJ, etc.) but my main point is that most of the Bay is suburbs on suburbs, most of them are at least middle class, and our ridiculous zoning/prop 13/NIMBY problems trap people wherever they are and discourage new construction, which contributes to the crappy old look of a lot of places.

My guess is the views from both BART and CalTrain, if you focus only on the graffiti and stream garbage along some of the corridor, can give you that impression.

You're describing small pockets of wealth that are scattered all over, surrounded by poverty.

Look at the surface area and the percentages of the population. That's what the article is about.

It's pretty clear that it's hard to live on even 100K as a family in the Bay Area, and if you look at the median incomes for most of the cities around the Bay Area they're nowhere near that.

I don't see how you counter that by naming off a few more rich microclimates.

Also, I wrote the article, and I'm born and raised here. I didn't drive down a street and come up with this. I've been here for four decades, watching it change, and this is what I'm seeing. Sorry you didn't like it. :)

When you make statements like

"The more I pay attention in the Bay Area the more I’m noticing that it’s a place of absolute poverty."

"Much of the East Bay is extremely poor."

You really need to quantify absolute poverty and extremely poor. Without some numbers to back it up the article comes off as out of touch.

Also with you living in San Francisco when you write all these things about large areas of the Bay Area as being extremely poor the article feels a little like you are looking down your nose at the "rest of the people". Sorry but that's what it comes across as.

I mentioned I grew up in Newark, i.e., Fremont. That's my real hometown.

But I see your point.

:) It is not about me liking it, but data just doesn't back it up. Here's data from US Census for San Mateo County

https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/sanmateocountyc...

Key facts: Median Household income is $93,000 and Poverty Rate is 8.4%

Based on this, I would say your observation should be reversed. Extreme wealth surrounding pockets of poverty (which is rapidly being gentrified, eg. EPA)

I think Jamie Dimon said it best, it's almost embarrassing to be an American these days. Homeless people everywhere, mentally insane people screaming on the streets, rude classless people (in the ghetto), failing infrastructure, a narcissistic demagogue trust fund kid as president. Every single major city in America has a ghetto not unlike a third world country - NYC, LA, Chicago, SF, etc. I've never understood why we tolerate this poverty in our own backyards.

There was a period when we were the model nation for the world, and that period is long gone. As long as America is ruled by the mindset of "everyone for themselves" and free market fundamentalism, nothing is going to improve - and in fact things are only going to get worse as the job market tightens due to technological automation.

Although you don't seem to like the president, you have made a lot of the same points as he did in his campaign. Maybe he will fix these issues and make America great again.

Not to get political, but the president doesn't have the power to change things at this level. It's up to congress and state and municipal governments to institute the kind of change you are thinking about.

Over the past month, I've started to consider that the people that support the president know this. They want him to champion the identity that they have and the policies don't matter nearly as much -- they just want to hear someone "defending" them.

I think it's far more about identity than it is any faith they have in him being able to actually change anything via policy or legislation.

So far he's basically just (unsuccessfully) attempted to roll back Obama's progress on healthcare, ban Muslims, build a wall to keep out the Mexicans, and give legitimacy to white supremacists. He's surrounded himself with Goldman Sachs executives.

I'm not really seeing the progress, but I hope he does make America great again.

Good comment. I think you mean "developing country" rather than "third world country". Switzerland and Finland are third world countries, for example.

Yes and no[1]:

Due to the complex history of evolving meanings and contexts, there is no clear or agreed-upon definition of the Third World. Some countries in the Communist Bloc, such as Cuba, were often regarded as "Third World". Because many Third World countries were extremely poor, and non-industrialized, it became a stereotype to refer to poor countries as "third world countries", yet the "Third World" term is also often taken to include newly industrialized countries like Brazil, India and China now more commonly referred to as part of BRIC. Historically, some European countries were non-aligned and a few of these were and are very prosperous, including Ireland, Austria, Sweden, Finland, and Switzerland.

The term Third World is still largely used interchangeably with the least developed countries, the Global South and developing countries.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World

Just yes, I think. If you want to be clear, say "developing nations". If you want to be unclear, say "third world".

there is no clear or agreed-upon definition of the Third World

Jame Dimon did say this recently, but the context of his frustration with government regulation of the banking industry. He is lobbying hard to get oversight removed that was put in place after that industry tanked the global economy only a decade ago.

If you think ghettos are new you're not paying attention. And generally speaking, crime rates are way down.

The parts I'm familiar with are painted a little more gloomy than reality.

Fremont has top rated schools and a median income above 80k. Combine income with college grad percentage and it's in the 81st percentile on the "superzip" metric.

Hayward has some run down areas but the median income is $54k. One the income/college grad metric it's 49th percentile. Basically average for the country. (When average is seen as a dominion of "sadness", that says something -- whether about the commentator, the state of the country, or both is up to you)

The problem, as is beaten to death yet still not enough, is housing costs. In "average" Hayward, a barely adequate home for a family will run you north of $600k. What you'd expect in most places as a middle class home closer to $750k+

This article reminds me of my coworkers who think San Mateo is sketchy "On the other side of the tracks".

I've lived 90th and International in Oakland and have a pretty good idea of what "red" looks like. Speaking from personal experience, San Leandro and Hayward are nice places to live in, and the crime maps match my experience with the area [1]. I understand the article was talking about poverty and not crime, but poverty and crime are correlated [2], so a crime map is a valid proxy.

I agree that some areas are a bit run down, but overall I think its the opposite, pockets of "red" surrounded by "green".

[1] https://www.trulia.com/real_estate/Oakland-California/crime/ [2] https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=5137

This article shows the danger of going by surface appearances and statistics in areas that you don't know.

There are a lot of places that don't look like much (for someone used to rich areas) but are decent, stable communities. That run-down looking restaurant might be a stable business that serves great food.

I think there's two things that are true -- the author is kind of a glib poverty tourist, and the Bay Area is becoming increasingly stratified in income, as illustrated by some of the things he notices. He'd be more credible if he was better informed about the people he's writing about.

It's funny, but that's true in a lot of places.. I happen to live in an apartment in an older neighborhood in Phoenix, mainly because the location and pricing was great... the crime rate's very low, and it's really close to a higher end area, so nice restaurants are close as well. It's not a bad neighborhood, just older. Most of the buildings were from the 50's to early 70's.

It's funny but more than one of my neighbors is in a similar boat, early 40's, works in IT, divorced, and just saving, mostly.

There's always the pat answers of "housing is the government's job", "this situation was created by public policy" but at this point shouldn't those in tech, the most lucrative and largest industry in the region, at least allot a little thought to the problem of inequality? In discussions defending Silicon Valley, "the press never covers the startups working on hard problems like human longevity or heart disease, but REAL companies that aren't frivolous apps exist" always gets trotted out. Well, how about companies that work on problems that directly impact the Bay Area?

At the very least, earmark higher budgets for corporate philanthropy and community outreach.

Sounds like a coordination problem with a first-mover disadvantage. It's in the best interest of each individual company to keep profits coming back to improve the business and it's competitiveness, rather than earmarking some for philanthropy and community outreach. The first company to do so would suffer while the others continue improving their business.

This is exactly why it's a problem to solve at the government level; a higher authority, with teeth, is needed to solve these coordination problems and force market participants to all do the right thing.

Certainly it should be the government's job because it is both intended to and should be most effective/efficient to fix such a tragedy of the commons type situation.

But your comment is also sad because it shows how despite all of the iconoclast rhetoric, Silicon Valley companies are often far more risk-adverse, some could say, cowardly, in not willing to buck change. Not simply on matters involving social value or controversy, but more mundane topics that have been brought up before on HN such as willingness to embrace remote work, create better interview processes, etc.

And that of course, is also understandable. Tech companies are only willing to disrupt the economic markets and labor practices that would lead to maximum value extraction and shareholder value. No one sincerely disrupts to "make the world a better place."

Isn't those exact companies and the businesses that will end up paying for it anyway through taxes along with others in the state? This certainly isn't a federal problem. I'm not sure how getting government involved fixes it as if their funds are just "free" and "exist".

Tech has absolutely nothing to gain from sky high real estate prices.

Casting it as an singular moral entity which you can then accuse of moral delinquency may not help in understanding or solving any particular problem. If it were in fact a hyper powerful agency that could change the landscape around itself merely through the commission of its moral will, why would it not have removed all of the anti-housing laws already? Tech workers don't want to pay millions for housing. It is not in the tech industry's best interest – therefore, the issue can't be due to tech having ill best interests.

"Tragedy of the commons"[1] doesn't seem to apply here.

That's applicable where (1) the free dumping of sewage into a common water supply or (2) advertisers get so good at making noisy attention-grabbing web ads that people have a strong motivation to start installing ad-blockers, making ad-based business models try and install more ad placements. It's similar to the Prisoner's Dilemna, where game theory has each player pitted against each other but the outcome is subject to a downward spiral of some common resource.

There is no downside for long-term property owners or the highly paid. If the well-paid engineers at tech companies were equally hurt by rising cost of living, then TotC might apply. They aren't, so it doesn't.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

Can't build because its too expensive, and building is the only thing that will make the pricing go down. Same problem with transit.

Even if you want to build public housing, its gotten so expensive that it will be an unacceptably huge chunk of the budget. Governments like China don't have this problem - if they realize they need to build it happens.

Those are the immediate solutions. But tech companies can also influence the situation by allowing remote work (less employees having to relocate to the Bay, or commute to one office), or even choosing to be based in, say, San Jose as opposed to San Francisco proper.

That's true if you think the real problem is the existence of green zones.

I'd argue that the problem is the existence of red zones, and we can fix that by helping green zones prosper and redistributing some of their productivity.

This is also a pretty pessimistic view of cities in general, if the best way to help a city is to abandon it. Could be true, but that's pretty dark. White Flight certainly reduced the affluent's competition for housing in cities, but it didn't exactly leave them better off. White Flight Round 2 doesn't sound like a good idea.

> I'd argue that the problem is the existence of red zones, and we can fix that by helping green zones prosper and redistributing some of their productivity.

The problem is when the socialized cost of “helping green zones to prosper” exceeds the redistributed benefits.

Given that green zones map pretty well to outsized political influence, there is a lot of incebtive to use that kind of language to sell a policy that focuses much more heavily on helping them prosper than on redistributing benefits. Especially since that reibforces their already outsized political influence.

EDIT: I'd go farther and argue that the existence of red zones already is a direct and deliberate outcome of policies directed at helping green zones prosper, because the manner in which that is done is to make sure that poor people, crime, and facilities which adversely impact land values are redirected out of green zones to somewhere else. Those other places become the red zones.

Hmm. It seems more complex than that. The neighborhood-destroying infrastructure that's being dumped by rich neighborhoods onto poor neighborhoods (high density housing and public transit) appears to be turning them into green zones, not turning them darker red.

I agree, there's not nearly enough redistribution. Finding a way to raise taxes from wealthy longtime residents commensurate with the region's present needs would be a start. Relying primarily on newly sold homes (prop 13) and newly signed luxury apartment leases (BMR) to provide the necessary subsidy isn't working.

It would also be great if we could compel the suburban governments that sign on for the benefits of growth (office space) without the costs (housing) to direct some of the funds they raise this way to the municipalities that really need them.

I don't think either of my suggestions were meant for abandonment. The first is slowing the rapid influx to the Bay Area region so that housing and infrastructure can have some breathing room to catch up. The second is to simply direct economic activity towards the traditional suburban communities of the Bay Area- San Jose used to be a core for SV, and still is, though it's lost a lot of luster to San Francisco. I would imagine there's both more housing and room to build housing in SJ than there is in SF.

Saying that construction is a 'basic job skill' is kind of an amazing way to say you don't understand what is going on there at all. Or that somehow it's just magic to you. Most jobs have a depth to them, and most people have to learn quite a bit to do them successfully.

Agreed. Based on the author's description, I think he basically is talking about what he sees from CalTrain or the 101 without actually looking into the areas he says are broken.

I live north of San Mateo in one of these "broken" areas. It is most definitely not broken, and nor are the people. But if you go down by the CalTrain line you'll see some trash strewn about and some houses that look run down. But go 200 feet away and it is no longer that.

This is fairly accurate, in my experience. I live on the border between Sunnyvale and Mountain View, and within a couple blocks is a gated street (closed to vehicular traffic) where a bunch of skateboarding teens hang out. On the Sunnyvale side of the gate are a bunch of small somewhat run-down apartment buildings, usually 4- or 8-plexes, and you can never find parking because each unit often has 3-4 working adults in it. On one side of the Mountain View street are 60s duplexes; on the other are 90s duplexes; and at the end of the street is a beautiful neighborhood with $3M homes.

The one caveat, as skybrian mentions, is that you can't really judge a family's financial status from where they live. A large number of residents in the run-down areas are immigrant bargain-hunters, often with tech jobs; even the run-down areas in Silicon Valley are better than many other countries, and so they'd rather save money than flash their social status. Oftentimes it turns out that they own 3 houses and are collecting serious rent money from young American techies who think they're top of the hill in Silicon Valley.

I'm curious whether this is different from other cities. When I lived in Boston, it wasn't all that different; you'd have gorgeous restored brownstones in the South End that were a few blocks away from homicides and drug deals in Dorchester and Roxbury.

To add to this, my wife and I explicitly chose to move in to a 'run-down' apartment building in order to save. Despite both of us having swanky tech jobs at the time. In fact, we conducted our apartment search mainly in spanish in order to get the best deal.

If you're living in run-down conditions when you are earning enough to still be saving and living in decent conditions somewhere else -- you're fooling yourself. Likely your swanky tech job is netting you relatively less than you think.

Curious about your logic there? My experience has been the opposite - it's the folks who live in run-down conditions and save 50-80% of their income for decades that end up with a $5-10M net worth, while folks who live comfortably all that time leave this world with maybe a couple hundred K.

Whats the point of dying with $10m?

What I meant is, if you are doing well you can both have nice place to live AND save. You aren't not doing well if you have to pick one or the other. Many techies seem to misunderstand their actual relative wealth in the area. Below $250k/y is lower middle, 500K/y+ is middle and 1M/y+ is upper. But everyone acts like their 300k/y makes them pocket rich while they live in a hovel.

1.) Not ever having to worry about not having enough money.

2.) Living knowing that you produced more than you consumed.

3.) Passing it on to your kids.

Anyway, from personal experience - living below your means doesn't mean deprivation. It means deciding what you actually want and not buying into all of the messages society sends you about what you should want. Usually you can get what you actually want for a small fraction of a tech-worker's salary, and then once you do that, why give the rest to somebody else?

Save a lot and retire comfortably somewhere else after 8-10 years?

Highly recommend watching: Ellen Dunham-Jones: Retrofitting suburbia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_uTsrxfYWQ

Basically what the author (Daniel Miessler) is seeing is this suburban sprawl being selectively re-invented. Originally the Peninsula was sprawl for San Francisco in the 1940-70s. Then the housing stock slowly aged and the rich people moved on to Pleasanton, etc.

At some point Oracle, Google and the dot-com bubble and associated traffic jams on 880/101 made it make sense to re-examine and subsequently re-invent/re-invest in infill locations like San Mateo and Mountain View respectively. Usually the leading indicator for re-development is the school district.

Mountain View when I was growing up was were you went for well priced non-Italian/French restaurants. In fact there are some original still there on Castro street still hanging on if you look closely. It was most definitely not high end baked French goods (i.e. Alexander's Patisserie).

I would say with the arrival of Box in Redwood City, it's starting to happen there too.

I'd also add that in places that are not physically constrained (like in Texas or even Southern California), you just have more sprawl. It looks different but it doesn't seem any better (or any worse).

I moved to the city for a few months a week ago and the poverty described in the article is apparent. Everyone you speak to is struggling to pay rent and afford more than subsistence. Perhaps it's fairer to equate San Francisco with London: most of the realestate is owned by the rich whereas everyone else is struggling to pay for inflated housing prices.

A separate note: I did enjoy San Jose. It's not wealthy but it's a quaint type of lifestyle that I did not dislike. To say that it's comfortable living, however, would be a stretch.

If government had just a little more money, and controlled prices just a little more, this wouldn't be a problem anymore. . .

. . .said every public office-holder in this area for the last fifty years.

From the article:

"Heading north from Fremont is basically sadness. Hayward, Oakland, San Leandro, Richmond, Vallejo. They’re all poverty stricken and broken. The only green zones I see out in that area are maybe in Dublin, Pleasanton, Moraga, etc., but I honestly don’t know much about those areas because I seldom get out there."

Oh no, what happened to Piedmont, Berkeley, Kensington and all the other lovely East Bay towns? Perhaps the author is only seeing poverty because that's what he's looking for.

To me, the suggestion that living in Dublin is preferable to living in Oakland sounds bizarre. A lot of people in these "broken" cities would rather be there than anywhere else, so they must have something going for them.

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