SF is so expensive that waiters can no longer afford to live in the city
m.sfgate.com
m.sfgate.com
Yet, at the most recent city council meeting, there were a large number of residents complaining about the personal cost of opening up supportive housing for homeless people. Not a financial cost, but a personally subjective "cost" of sharing their city with transients. This housing complex includes mental health services and employment services on-site and has support from the local city government. Instead of compromising and considering alternatives, these people advocated for removing the program entirely and passing the buck to the next city.
High costs of living exist regardless of "empathy" or awareness of "inequality". The problem is policy, not personality.
Is it really? The only difference between San Francisco of today and SF a la "Bridge Trilogy" (William Gibson) is that the have-nots haven't completely taken over the bridge yet.
be the change you wish to see in the world and all that
California, New Jersey, and Illinois all in bottom 5 for quality of life, New York at 37.
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/quality-of-...
Also, urban areas will have blight. That is true for any country in the world. But what makes the US unique is the historical context of slavery, reconstruction, segregation, white flight, incarceration etc. It's like 400 years of history and baggage.
sure, if you're white and well educated. The brown serf laborers have all been nicely segregated away so you don't have to see the misery
https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/03/17/marin-county-ra...
One could similarly point to the suicide rate and write the same sentence with liberal/conservative switched (California, New York, etc are all at the bottom of the age-adjusted suicide rates in US states).
The answer seems to be that US News defines quality of life in an extremely narrow manner. The measurement seems to place a high emphasis on community engagement (likely tied to religiosity) and natural environment (which seems to favor areas without large cities).
She thinks its the cutest city ever
I told her we avoided the other parts but we dont need to go there
SF is unique in that the tourist and commerce center attracts and tolerates the open air drug bazaar and the poor sanitary conditions of its patrons.
Most cities around the developed world will spend more effort to herd the "undesirables" into some corners far away from fancy shopping districts. We can debate the pros and cons (after all, nobody benefits from having to avoid human feces on sidewalk), but I don't think SF has much more actual inequality than most other cities.
Yes, sure, all they have to do is secede from California so that they are no longer subject to California’s Constitutional limits on property taxes and they can get right on that.
The only reason for restaurants to have paper thin margins is if there are too many of them. That will probably change once their waiting staff disappears.
And honestly, if people can afford to pay sky high San Francisco prices for everything else, they can also afford to pay them in restaurants.
Don't be afraid to charge what you're worth and what your customers can afford.
(My clients are mostly banks. I know they can afford me.)
Raising wages will never fix the problem. SF needs to build up or change laws to deincentivize people from living there (e.g. higher taxes on high-income tech workers). The latter has other issues associated with it, but would at least encourage the decentralization of tech talent to other parts of the country.
That's not the end game, because there is an endless supply of low paid labour willing to commute hours to work. Especially if the tips are better.
The places will be expensive, no doubt, but labour will capture a very small proportion of the hike, with the rest going to capital like brand and real estate owners.
The tech elite seems willing to cling to these sorts of market-mediated fair world falacies, because they refuse to acknowledge their own position in the capitalist society.
There's a huge fraction of the workforce that cannot afford San Francisco. It has nothing to do with tech. It's the lack of new housing and apartments being constructed that's driving the problem and making everything more expensive there. I don't even want to visit San Francisco again
No, it can't.
It's only expensive as long as there are people willing and able to pay the cost.
> There's a huge fraction of the workforce that cannot afford San Francisco
Yes, and that's why commuting is a thing.
> It has nothing to do with tech.
It has everything to do with tech.
> It's the lack of new housing and apartments being constructed that's driving the problem
No, it's that plus the money (largely from tech) chasing what units are available. Supply constraints alone can't control prices. If there's no demand, price is going to be zero (or undefined) however limited supply is, because no one will be buying. San Francisco has high demand (that is, lots of people willing and able to pay much higher than prices than the market price in many other areas) and constrained supply.
In addition to the issues with high cost of living that affect other big cities like New York and DC, the restaurant market in the wider Bay is somewhat distorted due to so many firms of high earners offering food on site. This shifts sit-down restaurants further towards the discretionary, incidental end of spending and away from daily needs.
Lunch hours typically have a lower proportion of high-income customers than dinner hours, but this decreases their share further. A common solution is to raise dinner prices to be a higher multiplier above lunch prices, but that only makes sense if the pricing won't drive away business to competitors. For most of these restaurants, attrition and consolidation will continue to happen, while a few will try to move further and further upmarket and focus on branding and an intangible experience, to remove themselves from pricing pressure.
"Analysts are also calling a lack of employees one of the biggest problems in the restaurant industry today." (My note: No lack of employees, just lack of employees willing to work for current pay offered.)
EDIT: "The demand for highly skilled help is especially acute in Washington, where a boom in restaurants run by creative chefs is outstripping the region's labor force," The Times wrote.
https://www.vox.com/2018/12/12/18136392/dc-initiative-77-rep...
"A judge just blocked another effort to raise wages for restaurant workers in DC"
There is no employee shortage, ever. Just a shortage of businesses owners who are willing to pay market rate for labor.
Does the city really need another stadium? Or would more housing have been better?
A tip should be an additional non-expected gesture.
But actually to your other point. If I'm interested in working as a waiter at some restaurant, but I'm uncomfortable with tips being an expected part of my wage, then why would I either pursue that job, or accept it under those guidelines? Couldn't I work somewhere else instead and get the same amount of money?
So you pay 15% on 2/3 of your meals, 10% on 1/6, and 20% on 1/6. But the mean is also 15%.
Giving 20% to everybody is Lake Wobegon syndrome, where all the servers are above average. If you don't adjust your tip based on the quality of service, you remove the incentive to strive for above-average service. You end up with servers that sit down at your table when taking your order and chitchat with you, instead of just doing their job professionally while you can see or hear them, and bitching about it in private later.
I've seen some other places with a different kind of tablet that simply has boxes for different dollar amounts of no tip, but they are typically not places that even have servers. Why would I tip at a retail shop when all I did was grab something off a shelf and bring it to the counter?
20 years ago, it was definitely 15% minimum, but somewhere between 15% and 20% was very common (mandatory large party tip was usually 18%).
Regardless, you are correct that the expected percentage has gone up over time, and that a non-tipper or low-tipper is hurting the wait staff when they don’t leave a standard tip.
The most likely outcome of this is that prices go up to factor in a 20% “tip”, the owners/managers keep part of it and pay the workers only slightly more. The formerly tipped position will end up making less.
Another possible (non-cynical) outcome is that the 20% is spread out to both front and back of the house staff. Again, wait staff make less.
If the wait staff stand to make less, they will never stand for changing the system. That’s why I doubt that it will ever change in the US.
Is the system reasonable and/or fair? Good question. Whatever the answer, it’s the system we’ve got, and the inertia is real.
All businesses face the challenge of continuously preserving a balance that (a) allows them to make money and (b) allows them to exist at all.
Are maximum wages (set by law) a thing in the US? I only knew about the minimum wage concept.
The OP is basically correct that restaurant owners don't want to raise pay rates to a level that meets a "living wage" standard. They don't want to raise what they charge customers to the point where they could pay those rates, of course--but I'm not sure there's particularly good data to support the assumption that their customers would balk at doing so. These are restaurants with wait staff in high-cost cities, and raising the average ticket price per diner by $2 or $3 may not be enough to dissuade very many diners from choosing that restaurant. (I mean, I'm sure there's somebody out there who'd look at a menu and say, "I'd pay $28 for that flat iron steak, but $30? No deal!", but it seems like it'd be uncommon.)
Is the situation the same for housing? Is there never a housing shortage, just a shortage of people who are willing to pay market rate for housing?
If not, what are your thoughts on what the difference is?
Individuals on the other hand can’t generally just will more money into existence to cover higher housing costs.
Interesting that 'individuals can always ask for a raise to cover higher costs; if they can't, they're not viable in the first place' might be true, but it sure sounds heartless.
"If no one will hire you at salary large enough to meet your expenses in $City then you can't afford to live in $City."
My skills aren't valuable enough for me to live in say, Manhatten, but I don't think that's outrageous or anything.
There is not an equivalent quota or limit on the number of employees who can work as waiters.
What business owners are willing to pay IS the market rate.
No, a market needs two sides and equilibrium, no different to a business owner having a hard time reselling Apple computers at say 30% over retail.
It's not a unilateral decree, fiat. If people are available and not willing to work for you for what you offer, it is inherently NOT the market rate.
You can have a demand at a price there is no supply for.
What a dishonest article. It's not an effort to raise wages - it's an effort to raise minimum wage. You may have different opinions about how it will affect actual wages, whether it will actually increase them or not - because being put out of a job is a 0$ wage.
But either way, even if you think that raising minimum wage WILL result in higher wages, you still have to admit that these things are still different and require some arguments to link them together. Silently misplacing one for the other, as if this assumption is so self-evident, is nothing but propaganda.
It is not a viable policy to legislate raised wages, and then legislate even higher wages when the cost of living increases in turn. The money actually has to come from somewhere. Businesses will raise prices to the point the market will bear, for both the lower and upper class. This is the fundamental issue with wage hikes. $15 is not more than $10 if everything costs 1.5x more after wage increases. Deregulated markets are able to (and have in the US up to this point) create more material wealth for everyone even as wages stay stagnant in dollar value.
The problem is not greedy businesses. They want workers who they can hire for wages they can afford. Due to inflated housing prices, the cost of living is too high for workers to live in the city, and thus the "living wage" is unaffordable for businesses. Why are the housing costs so high? There's a lot of evidence that zoning laws and regulated markets play a large role[0].
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottbeyer/2016/09/30/the-verdi...
I was always surprised that the waiting staff would actually stand with me and engage in conversation while I queued up to be seated. Travelling from the U.K. I had never experienced this level of "niceness ?"
Later I was educated that they are basically only earning anything meaningful from the tips. The wages were puny and they were increasing their chances of getting relevant tips by being so nice.
Things have gotten worse I believe.
* yes, yes, some people will contest classification of Brits as Europeans
I only got to suffer the featureless sprawl during the commute. Whereas I loved the cubicle I got to camp in while I was in that office.
Here in the U.K. I have to suffer open plan offices and in the winter months, the beautiful architecture is as good as not there at all.
You have both extreme income differences -- an engineer might literally be making 10x what a waiter does -- and also an absurd number of people on the high end. You don't have one or two or a few hundred or a couple thousand people earning an order of magnitude more than the median, you might have a hundred thousand people with incomes an order of magnitude larger than the people below the median.
So my question is: is there any research on what we want income distributions to look like? Would these problems be occurring if engineers made 2x, 5x or 1.25x what waiters did? Would they be happening if the number of engineers was less than 5%, 10% or 2% of the city's housing stock?
How would the current parameters have to be tweaked before people who weren't earning the top incomes didn't feel like they were being left completely behind?
Can you demonstrate that? San Francisco is more distinct from other municipalities for its poor housing policy, than for the presence and density of highly paid professionals.
The rest of your comment flows from this idea, that the presence of certain kind of people and what they make for a living is something under the control of policy makers. This seems like a strange idea in a country with unrestricted freedom of movement and a basically free market economy.
It is striking that you are willing to operate with the idea that policy makers could have that kind of power, while not approaching the problem from areas where they so clearly do have power: public transit and housing policy.
And while San Francisco has put its own delightful spin on it, gentrification is by no means unique to the Bay Area. Neighborhoods shift over time inevitably but sometimes these shifts are sudden and many former and soon to be former residents feel pushed out and left out. What are the parameters for a neighborhood population to turn over without anyone noticing or caring?
If there had been no change in demand it all, San Francisco housing policies would not have been a problem. That was not a robust assumption given internal freedom of movement within the United States.
And while San Francisco has put its own delightful spin on it, gentrification is by no means unique to the Bay Area. Neighborhoods shift over time inevitably but sometimes these shifts are sudden and many former and soon to be former residents feel pushed out and left out. What are the parameters for a neighborhood population to turn over without anyone noticing or caring?
Maybe it depends somewhat on the nature of the new residents. If they are moving for a new job, new building can blunt the impact. People will take the new housing that is within a credible commute distance of work. If, however, the new residents are deliberately seeking to enter and bid up historic or trendy areas, some kind of defense is necessary as well. In Berlin's case, there was legislation to prevent too much improvement of apartments -- putting in new kitchens and so forth -- in certain areas, to prevent the rent from rising.
San Francisco has new residents of both types; and suffers from many other forces. It is small and on a peninsula, so there is only one dimension for growth (Berlin, DC and similar areas can grow square-wise). Its housing policies prevent new building. Public transit is not that great; getting to work from the western half of the city takes almost as long as coming from Oakland. Thousands upon thousands of people moved here to take jobs in the area. Many of them targeted small neighborhoods like The Mission and Noe Valley and Potrero Hill.
The latter behavior is particularly remarkable in SF because these neighborhoods were typically far from their jobs. Company shuttles undoubtedly contributed to this problem. It was like public transit operating in reverse: centralizing the residences and dispersing the commercial centers.
If "the tip rate is going up", that is entirely a problem of your own making. You chose to tip more. You can also choose to tip less, or not at all (by going to restaurants with counter service).
If you as a worker wish to represent 20% of the cost of my meal off the top, in addition to whatever portion you also may get from the menu list price, you are a growing cost, one that invites cutting. There are vending machines that make entire fresh, oven-baked pizzas now. The robot does not get a tip. The service worker just cleans the thing according to a schedule, and refills the ingredient hoppers. Even McDonald's is installing robotic cashiers.
It's easy to find tipping guides written by current or former service workers that self-servingly inflate percentages over the historic tipping rates. But those writing such guides are basically advertising that they are becoming less productive workers. That seems like a dangerous thing to do in a world of cutthroat cost-cutters.
I would rather tip 20% than use mental bandwidth for that nonsense.
If you don't change what you tip in response to perceived service quality, there is less incentive to make an effort to provide good service. You're engaging in renegade behavior, just like anti-vaxxers relying on the herd immunity to protect themselves from their own decisions. As long as anybody has to play this stupid tipping game, everybody has to play it.
If you really don't want to worry about it, why don't you just refrain from tipping altogether? It's table service. The restaurant should be the one enforcing its quality standards, and not the customers, right?
Poor service earns 10%, but only if I intend to ever return to that restaurant. The worst tip I ever left was $0.02, and that number was chosen to distinguish it from someone who just doesn't tip.
I have never even seen service good enough to merit 25%.
I think it's perfectly fine to tip 10% for median service, so long as you tip more for good service and less for bad. Giving "everything is awesome" tips to everyone, all the time, is the tipping equivalent of "everyone gets a trophy" competitive sports. You're not really helping the people you're giving them to, because you're eliminating critical feedback signals.
that was my point.
Then we can just detach SF from California, and let it float out to sea.
https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2017/02/16/hou...
Increasing salaries isn’t going to create more housing, it will just drive up prices even more.
Unfortunately, subsidized housing and welfare enable businesses to pay less than a living wage. People that are in poverty are kept in poverty, and the businesses have a captive labor force.
It's almost like there's a specific cause and effect.
All in all, for a city that has an annual budget of 11 billion dollars, the city is a mess, and times of plenty beget times of crisis. At some point even people with RC will leave the city, and the downturn will not be negotiable.
Democracy at it's finest. I expect the rent and real estate to keep rising perpetually, that's what the voters seem to be demanding, even if indirectly.
But the music stops: at some point the bargaing of a tech-job will not be enogh to keep people in.
With the right political administration in power at the right time, they might even be able to wrangle a bailout from the rest of the country! The midwest successfully did it vis-a-vis UAW and GM (sure, the fatcats got a taste, but the real money was in preserve the taxbase of those towns and saving the workers' pension).
With a tax expenditure of 2,600U$S per household by the city management, i wouldn't expect any basic income ever.