The Silicon Valley paradox: one in four people are at risk of hunger
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska. I'd suggest that these people move there, for the low cost of living combined with the vibrant-enough economy. Unemployment was at 5% through the great recession. However, I find whenever I suggest that, people act like if they move there they will be lynched - as if the place is a primitive wasteland inhabited by backwards rednecks carrying pitchforks. In reality, it is a modestly wealthy area filled with dentists, insurance providers, accountants, and other mid-level white collar workers. You're more likely to die of boredom, but isn't that better than food stamps, and isn't boredom good if you want to raise a family? The people that read and write these articles don't seem to consider things like this.
The amount of money the region makes is more than enough to support that population over that area...
http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/
Cost of living on the peninsula has already pushed many people to the east and south and even then you don't get much of a break. Land use restrictions mean there is very little new land on which to build and having to jump through eleventy different legal hurdles to do so means that when built, it's already more expensive than many of those in need can afford.
I moved away after being there ten years as a software developer because the cost of living, level of congestion and crowding was obnoxious, and I have no intention of returning. But then, I had that option.
So, if 86,000 is "poor" (defined as the minimum needed to live in the area), the person doing the food preparation has to be paid at least that. The "burger flipper" has to be paid that.
If people moved out, quickly the "burger flipper WOULD be paid that". But that, in turn, would attract "burger flippers" who simply compare the money. Resulting in high unemployment, and the need for food banks again.
Its the concentration of rich people that is the problem.
Apparently so.
There are too many people to maintain our suburban character, sure.
It's the top result from googling "silicon valley population"
Still 7 million people is not a lot density-wise, I'm just saying you just can't blame high prices on people density only...
At least you can blame it on "not enough housing". Which sounds weird to me, cause cheap housing is very quick to build.
So I don't disagree with your standpoint in theory, the logistics always muddy the water.
I, again, don't disagree with you but to be so matter of fact is in my opinion incorrect.
Also, it's highly unlikely that moving will be as expensive as $16,000 anyways. Perhaps $6,000-$7,000 for a small family of two?
https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/6341/whats-the-ave...
Also, it is just not a good idea to borrow $15,000 on multiple credit cards at high interest rates when there is no guarantee that you will earn sufficient income to pay that money back in your new location.
It's easy to give out this kind of trash advice to other rich(ish) people on the internet. I wonder if you'd dare tell someone who was actually in the kind of situation you're describing that they ought to incur $15,000 in credit card debt and move to the middle of nowhere.
Even with non-terrible credit, you aren't going to get multiple credit cards with a total of $15,000 in credit line if you are food insecure; you might have gotten them first, maintained zero balance so that that money is all available for relocation, and then become food insecure, but that's a rather exceptional set of circumstances, not the norm.
Plus, this presumes the ability to also maintain income (in absolute terms, not just relative to.local costs) in a relocation. I guess if the food insecure people are also working jobs they can do remotely, that's reasonable, but if they are doing low-wage in-persom work, even if they can find comparable work in Lincoln, the wages are likely to be lower (clearly so at the lowest end of legal work, since the minimum wage is lower.)
How do you find a job, when you have literally 0-day you can spend without working?
Are there really than many jobs for people who flip burgers in Lincoln, Nebraska?
And are people who flip burgers in Nebraska so much better?
How could anyone here answer that question? It's not specific enough to answer. Could it be difficult to do? Yes. Are you trying to claim it's impossible, that people are actually truly trapped? It's not impossible, they are not truly trapped.
A train or bus from the Bay Area to Nebraska will run around $100. That’s around the same amount as Bay Area rent costs for just the time spent on the train/bus during the trip.
> How do you find a job?
To start, “Help Wanted” signs and odd jobs in the usual places (e.g. Home Depot). Then, network or use free internet at public libraries to search for something better.
> Are there really many jobs for burger flippers?
There are fewer jobs, but also fewer people attempting to get them.
> Are people who flip burgers in Nebraska so much better?
Of course not. But they live in a place where population has held steady (graying) instead of growing wildly, where there’s plenty of land, and plenty of housing stock on that land, so housing takes 25% of the burger flipping paycheck instead of 75% (don’t forget commuting time in the cost of housing). As a result, their standard of living is higher.
The Bay Area, or any high cost area for that matter, is a great place in which to save 20% of one’s income and a terrible one in which to live paycheck-to-paycheck 0%.
Children and family/friends who are around to support you and also sometimes watch your children are often a reason. Could someone move themselves and their two children? Yes, it would cost $300 (to start). Then you'd need to find a place where all three of you could live before you've actually even found a job. This short-term place to live would likely be a motel, meaning you'd likely be unable to cook and spending more on food to feed yourself and your family. Then you need to figure out child care because you've lost the support network of family (and friends) who were living near you.
Physical mobility, moving from state to state, in this country is often much harder than the simplistic viewpoint people seem to give it.
If your perspective is that of a single individual with no dependents (even if you're poor) then you're going to think that physical mobility is relatively easy and everyone should be able to do it.
If your perspective is that of an individual with dependents then you're going to think that physical mobility could quickly become a challenge if you can't afford the upfront costs and short to mid term costs after you've moved and need to "settle" yourself.
There are a lot of, "Sure, but..." responses that usually come about with this type of discussion. "Sure, but why couldn't they temporarily go into debt? Their long-term earnings would put them in a better place eventually." and "Sure, but why aren't they applying for food and/or housing assistance or other programs at the location they're planning to move to." or "Sure, but why couldn't they have family watch their kids while they go to the new place and get setup."
The reality is those perspectives are from someone educated enough to understand economics, government programs and how the system works, and someone with a supportive well functioning family. All of which someone working a food-service job is unlikely to have.
Don't make assumptions.
They can move. My reality is of a first-generation immigrant. My parents did not have degrees and worked minimum wage jobs. They moved multiple times when it became financially unfeasible to live somewhere.
It wasn't fun, it sucked a lot actually, but we did what we had to do, not what we wanted to do.
He's not handwaving anything. He's not promising anything, either. If someone wants guarantees, they've got the wrong mindset. It's all about managing probabilities.
>It's totally reasonable to think that a family with kids who moves to Nebraska is still going to be food insecure.
And it's totally reasonable to think that low income people who stay in SV will remain food insecure.
>If I'm an unskilled worker and I can live in the bay area near my family, where I'm comfortable, where I have friends and I'm food insecure or I can go move out to the Midwest where I have none of that and I'm still food insecure because now I have the added costs of childcare, less public transportation options, etc. AND I have none of the support network I had around SV then there's no way I'm moving.
Thank you for phrasing it as a choice. Just please own the outcomes of your choices!
Don't treat staying as a "default". Think of it as two choices (many, in reality, of course), and you are actively choosing one. So own the difficulties you will have while food insecure.
Advice often given to me in life, that I'm sure you've heard: If you're in a bad state, things are not going to change unless you do something about it. Granted, that something may make your life worse, but not doing much about it is usually a guarantee that things won't improve.
I'm not understanding some of this thread. Are people seriously looking for some kind of guaranteed solution? Most serious decisions - the major you pick, the school you go to, the city you live in, the job you decide to take - have attached to them a risk that your life may be worse if you follow through. When I was quitting my first job because of poor management and the work conditions, almost everyone tried to discourage me with your type of question: "Well what if you take that other job and it turns out even worse?" I just couldn't understand the question: So if your job sucks you will just sit and hope for better management?
It sounds like you're saying that something there is important to them, so they choose to stay. We all make choices and live with consequences.
> but moving would only make those circumstances worse
How can anyone be sure of that? But let's say it's true that moving anywhere else would make their situation worse. Then what are they upset about? They're already in the best place, aren't they?
Yes, I guess that's basically my point. Many in this thread are talking about "options" and "choices" but really what we're talking about is an option that's better for these families than the status quo. No one cares that there's a million things that could make these families worse off, we're here figuring out what could make their lives better. What I'm saying is that for most of these families the option: "moving to Nebraska" belongs in the million pointless worse off options bucket and not in the life-improving options bucket. Even when you speak of "consequences" you mean the negative effects of their decision not to move to Nebraska, but I'm saying that not moving to Nebraska doesn't have that many negative consequences because moving to Nebraska is a totally shit option for most people.
>How can anyone be sure of that? But let's say it's true that moving anywhere else would make their situation worse. Then what are they upset about? They're already in the best place, aren't they?
You don't understand why someone trapped in the cycle of poverty would be upset? Why someone who has to go to a food bank every week to get by would look at the incredibly wealthy citizens of the city they inhabit and be a bit peeved? Are you familiar with poverty? Are you human?
OK, this is interesting. One source of fundamental disagreement between people in this thread seems to be that some people are looking at options that are currently available, and some people want better options. I'm more in the first group because life is short and I don't want to wait in a bad situation for years in the hopes that someone somewhere will provide some totally new option that I'm really pleased with. Of course it goes without saying I want better options to be available for everyone. But that takes time.
> You don't understand why someone trapped in the cycle of poverty would be upset?
Yes, of course I do. I'm sorry if I made my point badly. It's just that you say moving anywhere else would make their situation worse. I don't accept that at all, but if it's true, then they're already in the best place for them to be. What do you want? Instant worldwide elimination of poverty no matter what choices people make?
They're upset because they're food-insecure. Did... did you forget how this whole conversation started?
My family had strong ties to Yugoslavia, until NATO bombed it, so we moved to Germany. We had strong ties to Germany, until it seemed likely that our temporary refugee visas weren't going to get extended, so we moved to the USA. We had strong ties to Washington DC, but it was too expensive. We ended up in Roanoke, VA.
You do what you need to do for your family. Life is about making choices and sacrifices. It's not anyone's responsibility to improve your life, you need to do that. These people cannot afford to live in one of the most expensive regions in the world, so they need to move.
You repeatedly phrase your family as being different from these people, your family knew what to do and made temporary sacrifices for a better long term success right? And these families just lack the grit or determination or smarts or whatever of your family right? Have you considered these families are doing the same thing as your parents? That they're making the same calculations your parents made but that the Bay area is still a better scenario for them? That your family isn't really that different from these families?
Moving from a SV Chipotle to a Lincoln Chipotle is great until I try to figure out what to do with my 2 year old son and realize all the gains I've made and more will be eaten up by childcare bills that my mom/grandma in SV could have done for free.
Moving isn't some inherent good that magically makes you better off, it's a calculation: just because your parent's calculation came up with "Move" doesn't mean these people doing the exact same calculation are going to come up with "Move."
Can I borrow that crystal ball of yours?
You're acting as if you/they have complete information about what life in Lincoln/elsewhere will entail.
A lot of your comments are simply loss aversion. Focusing on what you may lose, not on what you may gain.
Congratulations, you're now broke, homeless, jobless, with weak creditworthiness, no connections to local private and public support in Nebraska, needing to somehow acquire food, shelter, and some mechanism of paying for it.
EDIT: (Because the preceding was hatsher than it had to be without explicit statement of the upside) The point is, if their skill set and ability to advance is little beyond flipping burgers, their cost of living will leave them far better off economically long term in middle American heartland than being forever at the margin of poverty, propped up by municipal welfare in high cost coastal cities.
If it's anything like the mentally ill streaming into SF in some parts of recent history, they are shipped there by outside localities (lots of that's happened with one-way bus tickets for homeless in various directions on the west coast, too, aside from Nevada shipping mentally ill to SF.)
> But let's be charitable: we can fund a one-way ticket back, first class, to their state of residence at a vastly cheaper cost than for housing them on expensive land they will never be productive enough to work their way out of
Which is a good way to collapse wages and overwhelm infrastructure, both physical and social, in the place they get shipped (which won't be their “state of residence” in most cases, since that's where they are now), but I don't see how that solves any problem.
NYC has 10% of the entire USA's homeless population. Significantly more if you count the (probably large) percentage of the 635,000 or so in public housing who will almost never be able to afford even rent-stabilized apartments, and it is estimated that another 50% of that number live in that public housing off-lease.
About 10% - 15% of NYC homeless are formally listed as last address "outside NYC". But that likely vastly undercounts, because people might have had a relative or friend where they crashed for a few months, weeks... just long enough to get addresses for a few ids/bills to be switched over.
There simply isn't any more cheap land with good public transit infrastructure for new low cost housing, a huge low-skilled (often illegal) immigrant population, and no one wants to face reality.
You scrounge and save up or work odd jobs and get enough to move.
> How do you find a job, when you have literally 0-day you can spend without working?
There are plenty of jobs. They're not very good jobs, or jobs that most people want to do, but life isn't always about doing what you want. If you cannot afford to live somewhere, you need to move.
> And are people who flip burgers in Nebraska so much better?
My parents worked jobs equivalent to that in Washington D.C. It became impossible, so they moved to southern Virginia. You can live in southern Virginia on minimum wage jobs. There was food on the table every night, and a roof above our heads.
It sucked, don't get me wrong, but we managed.
Who takes care of her child while she does this? Does the kid go to child care? How does the single parent pay for the child care? Does she need to get a third job to pay for the expense of her second job? What happens when the car she takes to work breaks down, and wipes out her savings? What about when she gets sick because she's working two or three jobs, and is exhausted?
I dunno, I think your plan of "everybody who's poor should just move to an area where minimum wage jobs are sufficient to live" is a little poorly thought out.
"Change what they're doing" is far more effective than the vast majority of any government policy position. If you continue to subsidize these people by taxing those on the upper-income brackets and redistributing the wealth, you will simply prolong the problem.
The issue is that SV is far too expensive to live in unless you work in tech, law, finance, etc. If you don't, you need to move to somewhere where you can actually lead at least a semi-comfortable life, and where you can put yourself and your family in a position to succeed.
My proposal is that they do everything they can possibly do to better their position in life. If it means taking a second job, then they should take a second job. Are you asking me for specifics?
Here is how my parents did it when they couldn't afford daycare: My father worked 3rd shift (through the night) and my mother worked 2nd shift (afternoon-evening). This meant that I was alone with my sister in the morning/afternoon - i.e. the hours during which we were at school.
As I understand it, this woman is single, so even less income, which means an even greater reason to GTFO one of the most expensive places in the world.
>"everybody who's poor should just move to an area where minimum wage jobs are sufficient to live"
As opposed to your solution? You realize that California is one of the most liberal states in the US, right? You've been throwing policy at the wall for years now, yet you still have not managed to fix this problem, and it fact it continues to get worse each year.
Yes, because there's a specific example in the article that your solution doesn't do anything to address, and when I brought up that your solution doesn't do anything to address that example all you did was show me more examples that are irrelevant. So yes, I am asking you for specifics.
I think EU should make it easier for US citizens who get any job here to move over. Americans in general are super hard working. Europe needs hard working people, while we can provide them with free universal healthcare, free university education, and way more upward mobility than they could ever dream of.
The deal could be so that you can move to Europe for any job, and if you work for 5 years then you are eligible for permanent residence. If you loose your work, and become unemployed for more than 6 months you have to move back to US.
Yes, there would be risks, but at the same time, it could also be a win win - hard working folk from USA would get a chance to raise their kids in a society that would allow them to put their kids through college without selling a kidney.
I once emigrated to Austria. Permanent residency would have been offered after 5 years, but I came back to the US before that.
By and large, an American engineer moving to Europe is trading down in a big way - including but definitely not limited to financial compensation.
At the end of the day, in the US you get more pay, more respect and more recognition for the same work - and in many cases American software devs get vacation packages that are comparable to the European standard.
That low ranking is probably well deserved, but it applies at the macro level. The US medical system is fundamentally asymmetrical, but it's great for the "haves" - and for those privileged enough to enjoy good insurance plans, it offers some of the best healthcare in the world.
Given the context of this discussion, I think it's fair to assume that American engineers considering a move abroad currently have health coverage at home (or are in a position to get it). Apples to apples.
More importantly, would they be willing to learn the language?
All in all, I waste one day of productivity per year because of the IRS and FBAR filing requirements. I don't have to pay any tax.
Of course, you may still want to have a private healthcare insurance to have quick access to care. The public system in Nordics is great for preventive care for children, and emergencies and serious situations for everyone, but not so great for everyday items. Larger employers often provide a private health care plan so that employees don't have to spend hours in queues.
It's worth keeping in mind that it's relative upwards mobility - upwards mobility in the US conjures up some slightly different mental images. Top 10% in Denmark is absolutely unremarkable middle class in the US.
If you enjoy being relatively equal to your neighbours, then it's great, if you enjoy objective material wealth, less so.
Again, you might already be aware of that, but I'd say it's much more important to consider the benefits that come with a european wage that might seem unremarkable in the US: Healthcare, education, social security are the most obvious aspects, but in general I'm sure your money, even if it's less in absolute terms, will buy you a lot more in europe.
Parent didn't mention smart or stupid, he mentioned culture. Regardless of smarts, Americans wont be sharing the same culture with this or that European people.
>Isn't Europe full of Middle Eastern refugees and globalists?
Even if so, how would adding American immigration to that help?
>Is your view a minority or is it a common opinion of Europeans?*
We usually like our culture, thank you very much.
2. I'd say those who want to profit from "free" healthcare first. Kind of what happen with our expats: once they start popping kids they come back because they can pay a lot less.
3. Full of Middle Eastern refugees? Asking this is like someone asking if the US is full of Mexican illegals. No.
I started my comment a little "tongue-in-cheek" but the more I think about it the more I realize the culture difference could be hard: out of the UK people speak a foreign language, no credit score system, a lot more socialism, less PC-ness, being patriotic (out of sporting events) is usually not well viewed. And instead of simple racism you have xenophobia: most people don't care about your skin color but a lot will care about your country of birth.
From outside you seem obsessed with race and skin color. I like US stand-up so I watched all def on HBO: it is funny but "black there", "white there". It looks like the kind of difference we have between European countries: we lightly joke about it but there's always an undercurrent of repressed us vs them.
And I'd like more people to stop using the word racism for xenophobia: racism is based on appearance, xenophobia is based on origin. One is the fear of difference the other is the fear of the stranger. For racists, a black Spanish and a white Spanish are different, not for xenophobes. For xenophobes a White American is not the same thing as a white South African while they're the same thing for racists.
Chinese, Indians, Filipinos, Russians want to have a word with you.
And no, Americans won't move to Europe to do blue-collar jobs. That's what East Europeans, Asians, Africans already do, Americans won't do it any cheaper. Heck, go to the South, compete with the Mexicans. Why do you think it's any different?
If you really, really want to move elsewhere, there are plenty of opportunities. You'll have to brush up on geography and languages first though, and start assuming nobody will grant you special privileges for being an American.
Just as soon as the US does the same for EU citizens.
I'm pretty sure that any employable american can achieve that without hard efforts, and AFAIK most welfare is granted to salaried people, except for unemployment allowance. Same with education, some countries are equal (very low) tuitions no-question-asked.
For hardly employable 'hard worker' american, I'm pretty sure that are plenty of hard working immigration candidate to fill that. And there's no reason that low wages jobs will end better life condition for americans than others, and end up to the same problems that often comes with poverty : crime, social resent and injustice, just like home. If you think that americans will work harder and paid better that an struggling immigrant, I think you are highly delusional, low wages hard just enough to live, and nobody will pay more for the same job.
After getting the job offer and being sponsored by UCL, it took months for them to grant me a visa, and it cost thousands of dollars just to apply for one. (That's just what I had to pay out of pocket, and doesn't include whatever UCL had to pay to sponsor me.)
Assuming the words EU, Germany etc mean anything more than plots of land (e.g. a culture, a people, shared history etc), then merely replacing a population with another from abroad is not a solution to EU's or Germany's problem of aging population.
It might be a solution to "working hands" needed, but not to the general problem of "how we ensure there remains something like Germany in 2500 and is not just some geographical boundaries".
>Americans in general are super hard working.
Whereas Asians and Africans etc (common immigration origins into EU today) are lazy? In fact, as employers typically abuse them (based on their semi-legal status), they work hard even without all the benefits you suggest Americans workers would have (so from the perspective of the employers they're even better).
That's pretty much it. The Bay Area gives you the chance to be on the cutting edge of change, which - for a certain personality type that tends to be overrepresented in the Bay Area - is often reason enough to live there. Most of the people who want a stable & boring environment to raise a family have already left. Most of the rest are from regions where boring != stable. (Seriously: I'm expecting a kid in the near future, and in the childbirth classes, there are literally no white people - the only people having babies in Silicon Valley are seemingly Indian and Chinese, along with a smattering of Mexicans and other immigrants. I have a bunch of white friends here, and of the ones who have had kids or are planning to in the near future, they fit into two groups: 50% have moved back to their hometown already, and 50% are planning to.)
There's also the issue where history has basically never been kind to groups of people who felt they could live a stable, boring existence while clinging to old ways and enjoying a high standard of living. Makes me a little scared for America, but that reckoning is probably decades out.
The root of Silicon Valley's successes and its problems are the same thing, and they both stem from how markets operate. New technologies in automation allow companies to successfully compete with incumbents but use drastically less manpower. (This, BTW, is why large swathes of America have seen mass unemployment and stagnant wages for a generation; you may not feel it in Lincoln, but the folks in Detroit/Ohio/West Virginia certainly do.) Markets price based on your best alternative, so if you invent a technology that does the same work as 10,000 people and price it accordingly, you can redirect the wages of those 10,000 people into your company's profits, and if you do that with 100 employees, you can all become pretty filthy rich.
All that money flowing into the Bay Area drives up prices, because there's a fixed amount of land (and some pretty fucked-up NIMBYist policies). The cost of living is an effect of the region's prosperity, not a cause, and not an independent variable. If you are a rainmaker for one of the companies - sales, or a key engineer or manager, or best of all, the owner of the company - then you're doing just fine; your salary goes up faster than rents & housing prices. But if you have to compete with all the other unskilled people in the area for an unskilled position, your salary is capped by what they are willing to work for; remember, in a market economy, you can price based on whatever the best alternative is, and there are a lot of good alternatives for chefs, housecleaners, and security guards.
The market allocates the small available amount of housing to the people who are willing to pay the most, which means that the folks who are not indispensable to this large-scale transfer of wealth from the rest of the world to Silicon Valley get priced out and either have to double up, move to Clear Lake or Stockton, or live on the streets. Most people from other parts of America are not willing to do this, so they move back home. However, these living conditions are typically an improvement on what you'd get in much of Southeast Asia or Mexico, so you see these unskilled jobs taken by them. (Many of the Indian & Chinese immigrants are actually very intelligent & highly skilled - U.S. immigration policy makes it very difficult to move from there if you're not. But when it comes to crowding & quality of life, the Bay Area is a literal breath of fresh air compared to China.)
The interest in UBI among Silicon Valley's cognoscenti is because they're looking ahead to what happens when the technology wave reaches the rest of America, and all the dentists, insurance providers, accountants, and other mid-level white collar workers have had their jobs automated away. What do you do with the people left behind? What do you do with the engineers once they've written all the software to automate our daily lives?
Most of Silicon Valley is actually fairly free-market libertarian, but because they're so exposed to the market and have first-hand experience with how it's changing, a certain segment here is thinking very actively about what the end-game looks like.
But haven't you read what the very empathetic and kind poster before suggested as an answer?: These fucking losers should move to whatever hill cave's still vacant, because they are to blame for not having gotten rich fast enough.
I really like your writing, very precise and to the point. However, you completely leave out the option of taxing and fair redistribution. Because, yes, I do believe everyone should have a right to live in the Bay Area. Maybe not in the richest neighbourhoods and beach houses, but there's got to be a fairer alternative to dividing up the space than pricing out everybody but the richest. Sure, there's the idea of UBI, but that still seems pretty far out and for most people is not a realistic option.
The solution is to build more housing and stop subsidizing one-another, so that those that can afford to live there do and those that cannot move.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln,_Nebraska#/media/File:...
You're an idiot.
No amount of taxing and redistribution will achieve that, because the supply of housing in the Bay Area is restricted to grow slower than population growth. The only way to make that happen is to build more housing.
As an interesting counter example, iirc one of the main groups of people who survived the Irish potato famine were the Celts, because they refused to give up the old ways of eating wild Clover and switch to growing potatoes.
Generally I agree though.
EDIT:
Does that mean that those dying of famine could just go eat some wild clover, but they didn't?
Doesn't sound right.
[0] http://www.health24.com/Natural/News/Can-humans-eat-grass-20...
It's a situation the English have repeated in numerous countries and eras and one of the reasons I think England has a lot to answer for.
During the famine, Ireland was exporting bumper crops of oats and wheat and other things. It was a completely avoidable tragedy.
Starving people would eat whatever they could to survive. There was limited aid that was privately funded and slowest to a trickle as tenants were unable to pay rents. 40% of the population died or emigrated, which reduced demand.
can we stop perpetuating this myth!? Sure a lot of innovation has happened that area in the past but so much innovation happens elsewhere in the world. It's not the only tech Mecca and definitely not the best.
I have a feeling that you are seeing there a hyperlocal trend influenced by the particular local demographics. In the east bay from Oakland and north and in the mid peninsula, SF, and the North Bay, there are a lot of white families with kids (along with the other demographics you mention except perhaps fewer Indians)
You don't think that the influx of tech workers from places like Nebraska has any relationship to driving prices up for the locals?
If you're young, relatively new to the area (without a lifetime of friends and family here), and don't have kids, the prospect of moving away to some random, unfamiliar town is going to seem much easier than it really is for most people.
Do you imagine that adding an extra million people would not effect the cost of living or the vibrancy of the economy?
Who are these people? Having lived in both rural and urban environments, I don't think I've ever succumbed to boredom.
Then maybe the tech sector would realize they need to pay living wages for all the workers supporting their daily life. And a living wage in SV is much higher than the rest of the world.
Some people charge for the use of the labor they do with their own two hands.
Other people are simply charging for the scarcity of land which they didn't create or make valuable, but were granted the exclusive right to use by the government.
A lot of folks in the Valley who are the hardest hit by these economic changes grew up in California. It's ironic to me that somebody from the Midwest move there and then criticize the residents for not moving to where they moved away from.
Who do you think serves you lattes at Starbucks? Millionaires? Low paying work needs to be done, even in SF.
If you get a better image the first people to move there will be the rich ones who want out of SV and then turn the place into where they came from. Look what happened to Denver.
People live where jobs are, and a lot of them have reasons to stay in the Bay. She has children and a life. She's not a fucking software engineer that can just pick and move.
My parents worked as "pickers" for the Home Shopping Network near DC, making minimum wage. It became financially untenable, so they moved to southern Virginia to a place with good schools and where you can live and get by on low income salaries.
Even if we value family connections on a pure cash basis -- which I don't recommend -- moving can be bad for people. E.g., the cost of replacing grandparents with professional childcare can be astronomical.
Family also provides an economic buffer against the ups and downs that are especially hard on the poor. What if your old car has a sudden breakdown that you can't afford to fix? If you have family around, perhaps you can borrow somebody's old car or get a ride to work. Move to a place where you have no social network, though, and you could be in deep trouble.
I sympathize with their situation, I have personally LIVED their situation, but if they cannot afford to live somewhere they need to figure out how to move.
no, they don't.
You need to consider that telling people to leave the geographic area that is their family home is a shitty response. You need to consider whether, perhaps, there are government policies that can help these people. You need to consider whether sneering at poor people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps makes you a shitty person.
Also how is a single working mother going to have time to learn to fix her own car? you're on another planet right now.
I'm intimately acquainted with both being poor and poor people. I have never in my life sneered at them and I donate generously to help them when I am in a position to do so. I have been poor for the majority of my life (I am not anymore) and I have seen firsthand what works and what does not.
Your government projects, ideas, and policies are a complete disaster that do nothing but exacerbate the problem.
>You need to consider that telling people to leave the geographic area that is their family home is a shitty response.
It is the only honest response. It is not what people want to hear, and it certainly isn't as comforting as what most liberals will peddle to the poor working class, but it is the honest truth (as I see it, given my experiences and education).
I'm being very blunt in this thread because I am passionate about this issue. I have seen people's lives ruined, people that I grew up with, because they were trapped in a cycle of poverty and crime because their parents refused to do what needed to be done: pack their bags and GTFO and move somewhere where it is cheap to live and where crime is low.
>You need to consider whether, perhaps, there are government policies that can help these people.
Do you realize the scale of redistribution that would have to occur so that poor people could manage to live in SV? This place is too expensive for middle and upper middle class professionals, much less the working class.
What are your great government backed ideas? Publicly subsidized housing? Have you ever lived in a government housing project? Have you been near one? If you haven't, I will gladly share with you my experiences.
So price controls...
> eliminate no-fault eviction
"no-fault eviction" is, quite literally, a made-up magical concept.
A landlord that chooses to not renew your lease is not "evicting" you. Both parties have fulfilled their contractual obligations.
>any new housing production be allocated to existing needy residents by government lottery
OK. Sure, and how long does this go on? Do you really think that this is a feasible long term solution? If the social science and economic literature points to "Yes" then I'm all ears, but I don't think that this is the case.
>Optionally add downzoning to reduce landlord incentives to let buildings die of neglect (no opportunity to build anything more profitable).
This one was just painful to read. I mean....this is the exact OPPOSITE of what you want to do. The entire issue boils down to supply and demand, and their solution is to further reduce density and the supply of housing!?
Many can.
In my city (nowhere near SV), the cost of living is a bit high. I knew a bunch of low skilled workers who worked in restaurants, cleaning dishes, cooking, etc. They were all fairly close. When rents started shooting up a few years ago, they got together and made a plan - and moved to the Midwest, buying houses in the $40-80K range.
One of the mechanics I used to go to: Same story. Ended up moving to Texas where it is cheaper.
Most cases where I've seen that it is not an option fall into two categories:
1. A desire to be near very high quality services (e.g. one person's kids would get almost free health care from a neighboring university's hospital). Essentially, a desire to keep high quality tax discounted services. These people are making a choice - they can move if they wanted to.
2. People in some kind of hole - usually a financial hole. They want to stay pretty badly so they make poor financial choices, ending up in debt, with poor credit, etc. That makes it harder to go, well, anywhere. That's why the smart thing to do is move before you fall into that hole.
As someone who has lived in places, and grown up in places, where essentially we could have been forced out legally (and in one case actually were), I know what it feels like. And the solution for us was very obvious: Know that we do not have a right to stay where we were, and make contingency plans. For me, part of the contingency plan was to try to move some place that was much less likely to kick us out.
Because people who are food insecure don't have savings to relocate, or the ability to take the income they have with them, generally.
> I grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska. I'd suggest that these people move there
Lincoln has a population of 250,000; there are, per the article, 720,000 food-insecure people in Silicon Valley (and with California’s CoL-based poverty rate of 15%, ~4.5 million poor in California.) Aside from the previously mentioned considerations, that suggestion wouldn't be viable for making even a noticeable dent in the problem.
> However, I find whenever I suggest that, people act like if they move there they will be lynched - as if the place is a primitive wasteland inhabited by backwards rednecks carrying pitchforks.
While not necessarily addressing Lincoln specifically, that's (while perhaps exaggerated) pretty consistent, at least for the non-whites overrepresented in Silicon Valley’s needy, consistent with what non-white (and white, the though it usually bugs them less) travellers have consistently told me: their worst experiences of in-your-face, constant racial/ethnic discrimination and tension in the US are almost always in the Midwest, both white v. non-white and between non-white groups.
> isn't boredom good if you want to raise a family?
Not really. There might be some things that are good that very loosely correlate with boredom, but boredom itself is bad.
i'm asian american.
here's what life is like somewhere other than maybe 3 or 4 cities in the US:
1. constantly explaining to people why i am not white (where i'm from, where my parents are from, why my last name is what it is [it's anglo])
2. children are constantly getting the 'eyes pulled back' and other racist names/gestures at school, and all the adults (teachers/admins) think its hilarious too (it's just a joke! don't you love being the butt of jokes? why can't you just let everyone make fun of you all day and take it silently?)
3. name-calling 'chink', 'gook', etc are normal occurrences, not exceptional events.
4. the general feeling that nobody thinks you're really american. i.e. when discussing whichever asian country is in the news today they'll say "no offense".
5. oftentimes being ignored by people, even when you walk right up to them and ask them a question. for example when shopping in a store.
6. hyperawarneness of the hollywood situation (in tv and movies white people = gods, everyone else = a literal joke)
7. limited cuisine that you grew up with (although this one is changing)
basically it's just non-stop suffering. that's why everything is cheap in the midwest. it fucking sucks unless you are the 25% of the population that its designed for.
quite frankly if i had kids, i'd rather be STRUGGLING in california than outright RICH in the midwest, because i don't think you can be rich enough to actually buy your kids a good enough life to make up for racism. it's borderline child abuse.
the kicker of course is not only do i experience this kind of stuff in i.e. michigan, people visiting from the midwest do this to me in my own home city.
That's not to say you can't find good places in the Midwest, you just have to shop around to find an educated cosmopolitan community. But the racism here is out of hand and I don't think white people are generally attuned to just how bad it is.
2. I can count the times this happened in 20 years on one hand. 3. Same as #2. 5. Never experienced this at all.
i was mainly talking about raising existing families, but yeah, this is true also. basically if you're not in the top 5-10% financially and physically as an asian guy, just forget about having a romantic life.
B.S.
If they cannot afford it, they can move. My parents moved, I have moved, it f'ing sucks, but it's completely possible and feasible and the responsible thing to do.
If you are working but food insecure without savings or such alternative support assets, then even if the long-term prospects are better in the destination, it may not be l feasible or, even if feasible, responsible because of the transition costs.
You can't make up for starvation today with better long-term prospects.
The "is doing %s a fundamental right?" argument works a lot of ways.
Is preventing other landowners from building high-density housing on their property (which would decrease the "$2000/month" rents, a blindingly obvious signal of low housing supply) a fundamental right? The crisis mentioned in the article would be quite lessened if minimum rents in the area were far lower; which they would be if NIMBYs weren't abrogating the property rights of others by preventing the construction of new dense housing.
However you do have a point. If people simply left, it would put upward pressure on wages for lower income jobs. But it seems there’s a limit to supply and demand. At some point things become borderline predatory.
I live in the Midwest, I like it here, and I would welcome people who want to move here, but this is telling them to come here for all of the wrong reasons.
Foreign investment in housing is also putting upward pressure on cost of living.
As with most things, the problem is more complex.
But that the next position offered to me, paying, say, 3x my then-current wage, was in NYC, full-time and on-premises only, so I moved, despite the cost of living.
Probably once communications improve in these remote areas, working from there will become a more widespread option for IT people. Most of my current team works remotely, from offices in other cities across the globe.
The other problem was getting education for children. Finding and affording it is an important cause for moving.
The ability for people to do any product discovery (where the product is the city/town) prior to relocating is quite limited with huge ramifications/risk if you get your selection wrong.
A bit like a Lonely Planet/Tripadvisor/Yelp but for real life. It could crowd source ratings of cities by some basic quality of life score based on various attributes - housing costs, openness to new ideas, food scene, etc. It could verify residency by requiring you to provide GPS coordinates for a month before letting you rate. It could even be monetized by apartment providers, employers, restaurants, etc.
The root problem seems to be that the decision to move is basically emotional, and usually depends on life factors that no startup can influence. I'm here for two reasons: family and startup (my wife's family all lives around here, and I have a nascent startup where if it takes off, it'll be really handy to be close to investors). Among the other people I know who are thinking of leaving, or whom it doesn't really make economic sense to be here, what's keeping them is always similar things. They work for Google and there's no Google office near where the rest of their family lives. They grew up here and have sentimental attachment to the place. They really love the warm Mediterranean climate and can't imagine living in a place with snow or rain. When you dig into their lives, usually staying is actually the right choice despite the high expense, and it's more "Well, I wish I didn't have to put up with the cost of living and massive traffic snarls."
https://teleport.org/cities/portland-or/
https://teleport.org/compare/portland-or-vs-raleigh-vs-los-a...
Seems like it was founded by former Skype employees and recently acquired by a Relocation/Move coordination company.
You seem yet to have considered a thing like:'is living in San Francisco a fundamental right' for you?
Of course to them the only solution is more money, that's the only solution they seem to know. They'd be more believable if they fixed their own literal and metaphorical neighborhoods first before continuing their personal campaigns of empire.
Sorry if it's whiny, it's just that the contrast between words and actions is stark.
Ditto with USD, ditto with BTC.
UBI is one way to keep people playing; but I'm extremely wary of this idea. UBI without some sort of communal/anarchist/kibbutz-ian distributed structure binds society in yet another way.
'You're free as long as you do what I want', is not something we as a society should want, yet it is almost universally true. The US wants nations to be 'free' so that they do what it wants; it's only natural that this extends all the way down to the individual.
More than a mere imperfection...
At the very least, it would force companies contracting minimum/low wage workers to raise wages substantially (because why work on a shitty job if I can have the same money for free ?), which in turn would mean a substantial increase in prices, which in turn would make UBI money not enough to survive for most people relying exclusively on it, and we are back at square one.
UBI seems to me the classic "easy solution for a complex problem", that in practice would create even more problems than the actual system.
> which in turn would mean a substantial increase in prices,
Higher wages only result in higher prices in non-competitive industries that rely on human labour. I think what would actually happen in competitive markets is they'd be constrained in their ability to raise prices and instead shift even more rapidly toward automation and capital investment to cut wage costs.
The optimistic scenario would be lots of crappy jobs automated out of existence, and people with more free time on their hands.
Poverty is a complex issue because there are so many different causes behind it and they are often intertwined. A few reasons off the top of my head: systemic oppression and social prejudices, mental health, desperation, poor self-perception, lack of opportunity, irresponsible handling of money, ineffective upbringing, bad set of cards, medical problems (and the often accompanying debt), terrible education, malnutrition, a system that largely blames the impoverished for being so, rich people who get to set their own definition of charity for financial gain, and the list goes on and on ...
It'll never happen, but I think a much better solution would be defining a set of basic needs where more money != better quality: healthcare, food, education, housing.
Sounds crazy, doesn't it? Especially that last one.
The solution is to increase wages for the people that work there but can't make a living there. And for the tech companies to do their societal duties and spread work (and wealth) across the country instead of focusing it in that area.
If you don't want to use income, I guess you need to rezone the housing? That's also extremely impersonal.
There's not much you can do as an individual, unless you want billionaires to pick random neighborhoods to sponsor. And that does very little to fix the overall situation.
They could move their companies elsewhere but even if that helps the neighborhoods it's a lot closer to abandonment than fixing.
How?
I'm serious about that - I think most of the tech billionaires who care enough to seriously support UBI are trying to fix their communities. Lots of people think their ideas like deregulation or more technology-focused schooling are counterproductive, but they seem largely well-meant. (The deregulation stuff in particular looks like a matter of principle; we have long-standing examples of what it looks like to push that selfishly.)
But all they have is money, really. The push for expanded housing has been choked by zoning boards and courts since Day 1. The tech industry has surprisingly little political influence because California is so large, and so entrenched with old-school Democrats. And "it came from tech" is basically enough to sink any kind of community initiative among anti-gentrification forces: low-cost annual bike shares were designed as a community good accessible to the poor, and the response was still to destroy all of the bikes as gentrification. "Throw money to people" is pretty much what's left to them, and UBI is a more stable approach to that than charity; even tech billionaires can't cover SF's housing costs alone.
I'm not even trying to defend tech billionaires here, particularly. I just don't want us to make all other change contingent on fixing San Francisco neighborhoods - because it seems like no one actually has an answer to that.
It's a completely artificial construct that drives up the cost of living and robs the poor with rent seeking.
All of California's inequality problems go back to that. High salaries for some people help make it stronger, but the greed of the NIMBY homeowners is a far greater cause of putting people at risk for going hungry, because they have been trying so hard to keep them out of housing.
Well that cuts to the very heart of democracy doesn't it? Why would the government of territory X not answer to the taxpayer-voter of X, over people who merely want to live there?
There are reasons why they might of course, enumerate those reasons and the real dynamic will come to light.
The Nash equilibrium for any sufficiently stable democratic system is for 49.9% of the electorate to be treated as subhuman. Democracy inevitably becomes tyrannical if civil institutions fail to defend the interests of the minority against the interests of the majority.
What rights go along with property? Does it include the right to stop your neighbor from changing and improving their property?
It's called "zoning", and it's a perfectly natural construct.
And if you're going to be fair, you'd acknowledge that ultimately it presents a set of tradeoffs, with both positive and negative impact.
All of California's inequality problems go back to that.
Inequality is a very complex problem, with many forces and actors at play. Any analysis that attempts to reduce it to a single causal factor will instantly fail.
Zoning is invented by people, as you correctly noticed, to balance several trade-offs. Maybe in 1950s it was adequate; since 2000s, the balance of trade-offs has shifted drastically.
Maybe it's time to rebalance things. The problem is that those who profited form it most (the old realty owners), due to that very fact, can also afford to spend most resources (as in time, money, and lobbying efforts) to resist it.
No particular implementation of zoning law is a "natural construct", and USian zoning laws have an extremely particular focus on preventing the construction of high-density housing (hell, some jurisdictions even criminalise roommates in pre-existing housing). There's nothing natural or inherent about that; and plenty of other countries have more sensical zoning laws that provide for adequate and dense housing supply while still having zoning (and they have lower rents and less problems with homelessness and housing-cost induced poverty, gasp).
Or that is to say, "natural".
Well this is part of what keeps tech workers from making as much as they'd like to and it definitely contributes to the plight of unskilled workers but not as much as this board seems to think it does. There's no realistic zoning changes in SV that are going to make a big enough dent. Unskilled workers will still be spending absurd amounts of their paycheck on shelter except now they'll be living under a restaurant exhaust system or above a noisy bar.
The real winner of zoning changes is going to be well-paid professionals who can buy up real estate with their savings and become the NIMBYs of tomorrow.
Another factor is that a good chunk of the tech's business was about making things cheaper rather than making new stuff. Amazon is cheaper than bookstores, Uber is cheaper than regular taxi, and so on. Even if the tech helps make the costs lowers, it also often translates into lower worker wages, and doesn't create more value overall that what existed before.
"Redistribution" is in itself a frame. Generally in modern discourse it means post earnings income redistribution. UBI, dole, income taxes, pensiins..
There is (just in terms of all options) also the distribution of earnings, the distribution/redistribution of wealth, and the distribution of wealth accumulation. All these affect the disparities and their trends. There are very few policies acting on these. Income taxes, not wealth taxes. Income support, not wealth building. There was some very controversial talk of pay caps or limits to ceo-janitor pay ratios... But this is outside of the main avenues of normal policies.
Most of what we (wealthy liberal democracies) "do" in this regard directly to affect disparities is post earnings redistribution and (substantially) distribution of consumption (public services like schools and health services).
..no concluding point... :)
1 http://www.politifact.com/california/statements/2017/jan/20/...
The economic output in sheer profit terms of Silicon Valley companies is probably enough to feed the continent. There are probably scores of individuals living there that could create a food program with 1/4 of their net worth that could prevent all hunger.
This kind of makes the point to me that the skillset to get somebody a lot of money is the exact opposite skillset necessary to care for their neighbors.
It's about the environmental conditions around electronics manufacturing, and their disproportionate impact on immigrants and minorities. Maybe a bit too hardcore for the optimists here (I'd include myself), but it covers similar issues to this Guardian article and is worth being aware of.