One Year in San Francisco as a Software Engineer
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One moment I'm in Twitter HQ, enjoying free food from around the world, place is buzzing with techies. Next moment we wander around a bit and there's a whole park where the homeless are living in the bushes.
I was literally in a place where one guy I met was designing self driving cars, and another guy was wandering the street with no shoes on, fighting with his invisible friend.
I also thought the natural surroundings were a contrast with what people have built. Minus the bridge and a few landmarks, the city looks kinda bland. Too low-rise for such a popular place. But there's hills and natural features that are quite spectacular.
The pretext is to not encroach on the nature.
https://www.thebaycitybeacon.com/politics/the-sierra-club-fi...
Not wanting to pave over some of the green spaces sounds laudable, but the same people fight against growing 'in' and 'up', which is the only thing you can do to add to supply if you won't go out.
It's easy to circumvent, but perhaps we shouldn't support sites that are so hostile to their users they block places with sane data protection laws.
" it will have come as no surprise when Romanian authorities attempted to use the GDPR’s wide powers to threaten journalists investigating corruption in the country. "
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/12/year-gdpr-2018s-most-f...
The NIMBYs would be less motivated if rising land values were captured by taxes rather than winners of the homeowner lottery (and who likes SF NIMBYs?)
A lot of people sitting on inefficiently used land would also be driven to sell (and their bungalow could be demolished and replaced with apartments, increasing supply).
Also more tax income.
One problem with this is that a lot of land owners have been in the city for decades and their property tax rates are protected under Prop 13 [0]. Basically their tax rates get adjusted for inflation but aren't reassessed unless ownership changes or there's significant construction. Raising tax rates won't touch these people.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13
Support is rising quickly.
> Prop 13 already has a few nuances for specific counties.
It does not.
No, they don't. The tax basis value is adjusted annually to the lesser of the actual value or 2% greater than the previous year’s tax basis value in the absence of an event allowing unrestricted full-market assessment (most sales, for instance.)
The 1% maximum increase does not (except when inflation happens to be unusually low) amount to adjusting for inflation, and it's not done without reassessment (value drops—rare in the Bay but still can happen—are immediately reflected, but increases are capped.)
> Raising tax rates won't touch these people.
Plus, the same thing that creates the limit on basis increases also puts a hard cap on rates.
After a while, I came to believe that lots of attached housing up and down hills is actually a pretty charming street form. On a flat plain, it would be claustrophobic, but the relief creates views that open up the dense landscape. Lots of San Francisco photography emphasizes this.
It makes me wonder why new developments today are always built in the flattest places -- the flatness practically forces us to include a lot of empty space, usually in the form of lawns.
Generally speaking, it's more expensive to build on land with a significant slope. I heartily agree, however, that it results in a much more interesting built environment.
I think you've got the causality backwards there. A lot of people still want lawns and flat land is easier to build on. There's nothing about building in a plain that prevents building dense.
Source: Grew up and lived in Indiana, now live in SF.
There are people willing to pay the design and construction premiums for a hillside location, but they are not buying developer houses :)
Also, the lawns provide a water buffer that's essential for managing stormwater runoff. The more densely paved a city is, the more likely it is to flood catastrophically when storm sewers overload. Which isn't a problem in SF though
Victorian houses on hills make SF one of the most beautiful city in the US in my opinion. It has decent transit (which should be better !), walking around is pleasant in most neighbourhoods, the parks are amazing (ever been to Glen Canyon ? Land's end ?)
From a distance, they look beautiful. Up close, most are sort of gross looking and not well maintained. You’d think the cost of taking care of a little house would be negligible compared to the price of the house itself.
"Rent control is in effect for all San Francisco renters who reside in buildings constructed before June 1979. This means your rent can only increase by a governmentally mandated percentage each year, based on the cost of living index, and with a 30-day notice. If your landlord has improved the facilities in your building, he can petition for an additional increase, but the Rent Board must approve his request, which can't exceed 10 percent. If a landlord is negligent in his maintenance of the building or units, you can make application for a rent decrease to the Rent Board."
https://homeguides.sfgate.com/san-francisco-rent-control-inf...
Original Victorians definitely fall in the pre June 1979 category.
I'd say 95% of them are actually 2-4 separate apartments.
It's definitely not cheap to own a Victorian in San Francisco even with renters.
I'm also a firm believer in trying to do as much maintenance myself as possible whether it's home/vehicle. If you own something you're going to care about it more and go the extra mile to make sure the work is done correctly. There are some jobs though where I know it's over my head.
Up close a lot of the USA looks unmaintained compared to Europe/Australia.
Every time a foreign friend visit me there it would only take a couple of hours for them to say something like "...everything looks kind of half finished" , or "wow, this place is falling apart"
Why would you think that? Sure, SF has high real estate costs, but it also has high labor costs (including, for most people who can afford to live there through work, high opportunity costs of diverting personal labor to maintenance.)
If you had said Yosemite, I could agree with you.
To be fair where Twitter is located, and that Sixth street corridor has literally been one of the worst ares of the city for years. Because of that there's a large number of drug rehabilitation, mental health, and community services that are in that area to be close to the population they serve and to take advantage of some lower rents. The flip side being that it also draws in a large population of the homeless seeking those services.
TLDR - Twitter chose to put their HQ in one of the worst parts of town.
Other interesting note, San Francisco has always distributed their low income housing and services across the city unlike some city's with concentrated neighborhoods of low income housing/projects.
My office is also in that area (6th and Market), I would argue it's even worse there compared to Twitter. However, it has been getting better in the last year or so, and that trend is likely going to hold up. For example, the city is investing a lot of resources and capital to make it better: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-ge...
Having said that, I rarely feel unsafe walking around that area.
Has this actually been concluded? That it is the "tech industry's fault?" Because I feel like I could fence off any claims as such by asking, "well, why didn't the government do anything about it?"
Based on my experience in multiple major metropolitan areas, the "tech industry" here in SF seems to be the most engaged in "doing something about it" than anywhere else. Is it because the problem is bigger? Maybe they're just better at marketing than the companies in other cities? Fair questions. Maybe.
I remember reading in the local papers when I lived in Mountain View that Google was going to assign some # of a new housing project they wanted to be low income housing - at my understanding, to be a total loss to them. They were going to build bridges, footpaths, and parks to "offset" the burden of the increased number of residents in Mountain View. I have seen similar from other companies.
In Houston, BP nuked the gulf of mexico and then fought everyone over how "responsible" they are for it. Chevron donated some fossils to the Museum of Natural Science. I dunno, I just feel like people are being unduly critical of the tech industry in SF, as if some homeless people poop on the streets because rich engineers ride buses paid for by google. Why isn't there better public transit, so the buses aren't necessary? Why block the proliferation of scooters and bicycles, so people are far more motivated to take Lyft or Uber? Why aren't there more public, 24/7 restrooms? And why isn't the Oil industry taking more flack for turning Houston into a 75x75 mile square of choking freeways? Because poop is grosser? Grosser than runaway climate change? Poop happens in Houston, too.
I just feel like SF is a big giant target, the go-to punching bag, because Big Tech, and yet meanwhile Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Finance, Big Ag gets away with dramatically worse in cost and human suffering.
What other solution could be surmised from your claim?
Tech brought wealth into the city. Prop 13 is the law that made that wealth toxic to the people that lived in it by enacting a titanic perpetual wealth transfer from community to homeowners (and creating a class of freeloading NIMBYs).
In a nutshell, the tech industry generally tries to point the finger at lack of supply and blame NIMBYS for obstructing housing construction. But this can be seen as a defensive strategy: it’s pretty clear that a sudden, massive surge of high income earners into a constrained area in the top of a peninsula with weak tenant protections will push a lot of poorer people out of their housing.
It’s not only the fault of the city not to build housing fast enough. We’ve even seen “strange” effects in other boomtowns (Seattle) where building doesn’t solve the problem.[1]
It’s not that strange if you truly understand economics 101. It contains the concept of price inelasticity, which one might see under boomtown conditions (insatiable demand for a necessity, essentially). But to even engage in a real economics discussion kind of misses the point. Mostly the tech industry wants to deflect blame for the problem.
[1] https://knock-la.com/seattle-a-cautionary-tale-for-supply-si...
Oh for fucks sake. You realize this is what happens when a city becomes successful right?
If you want to blame someone, its the NIMBYs: scuttling housing projects that would have eased the bubble and helped house a lot more people for reasonable prices, while benefiting from the economic successes of the companies and people moving in.
Exactly this. In and around Amsterdam, housing prices are booming. The number of homeless people on the street has hardly increased, because we spend massive amounts of public funds to keep the homeless off the street and also to help them get a home. The biggest issue is graduates, that have to share houses or move out of the city. Also, it's nearly impossible to buy when you're alone.
Prop C is all about doing that. It passed recently. Against the will of much of the tech industry, notably. (Benioff a major exception of course.)
The mayor of San Francisco also opposed it. Pumping more money into a broken social services system is a pretty problematic idea and it's not like it was only tech companies opposing it.
That of course discounts how the actual tech workers voted. I'd be curious to see polls on that. Anecdotally most tech workers I know supported it.
Low property taxes and Howard Jarvis's "taxpayer foundation" are the ultimate villains here by fighting to create this exact situation.
The people who are fighting to escape being in $1 mil negative equity by going to town halls and kicking up a fuss arent necessarily deserving but they're simply reacting to incentives put in place by others.
The property tax rules were originally passed to protect senior citizens from losing their homes because they couldn’t afford to pay surging tax rates. A boom happens, their house values go up, but they’re still living in fixed incomes.
I literally just read a Twitter exec, on Twitter, openly say that well seniors could just sell their homes. Nice! Great solution. Just leave, old people!
Or, they could just do a reverse mortgage. Sweet. Those are totally unproblematic for seniors, right?!
I just watched Hell or High Water which is about two guys that become bank robbers because their mom was going to lose their home to a reverse mortgage.
Some families struggle to put their life savings into a home and don’t have anything left over for other investments. What you’re proposing is still going to place pressure on seniors to move lest they lose a lot of estate value.
Basically I think you’ll find support for doing this go to rich who can afford it. But a blanket shift to liens on cash-poor seniors’ homes could end up disproportionately hurting the less fortunate.
Then absolutely nobody will ever be thrown out of their home because of owing taxes, and there's still enough property tax income to pay for services. Everybody wins and grandma with the multi-million-dollar ancestral pile in SF can stay!
I'm honestly not seeing any significant downside to an approach like this. Do you?
Or...sell to a condo complex developer, get some cash + a unit in the new building + housing while it's being built. Win-win. An condo unit is less maintenance to deal with, which is a plus for a senior. They also get to unlock some of the value of their property, and turn it into cash they can use now, without having to move away from their existing networks of friends and family.
> People are living on the streets because they can't afford housing, because there isn't enough being built.
So you're making an ethical appeal that old people should be forced to sell their homes to solve homelessness. Ok, I'll take you up on that.
You've only cited the supply side of the problem. You could just as well say "People are living on the streets because they can't afford housing, because too many techies are moving into town. Young people living in a fun adult playground is not more important than solving human misery cause by the current state of affairs."
Now which is more important: helping wealthier people live in a funner city or keeping seniors in their homes? What's the first priority here?
My proposed solution preserves community relationships.
> So you're making an ethical appeal that old people should be forced to sell their homes to solve homelessness
Nope. I'm arguing that people shouldn't be able to use zoning to wield power over other people's property to the unreasonable extent we're seeing now. That they can do so is a result of laws like Prop 13 - there's no personal cost to being anti-development.
> People are living on the streets because they can't afford housing, because too many techies are moving into town
You're literally arguing that no city should ever increase in population - it should stay frozen forever because god forbid, otherwise the neighborhood might change.
> Young people living in a fun adult playground
What does that have to do with higher rent and property prices? Or anything else?
> Now which is more important: helping wealthier people live in a funner city or keeping seniors in their homes? What's the first priority here?
You can do both and have no homelessness. Oppressive zoning laws prevent it.
FWIW that was the sales pitch not the reason. The same people who got prop 13 passed on that basis also demonstrate their concern for the elderly by lobbying to slash public pensions in California:
https://www.hjta.org/california-commentary/public-pensions-c...
"A boom happens, their house values go up, but they’re still living in fixed incomes. I literally just read a Twitter exec, on Twitter, openly say that well seniors could just sell their homes. Nice! Great solution. Just leave, old people!"
The additional free money capital gains ought to take the sting out of having to move. Renting pensioners don't get that. They also don't get 1%'er lobbies pretending to care about them.
> The additional free money capital gains ought to take the sting out of having to move.
Well, there you go. Openly arguing for forcing grandparents out of the homes they’ve lived in for decades. This is an amazingly callous line of argument to me.
The additional free money capital gains
This is probably fine except when they actually need to sell the house for whatever reason.
When you have an entire global population of techies that suddenly want to move to the heart of their industry, you may experience price inelasticity, which basically means you won’t see much downward movement in price.
Think of it: before prices come down to affordable levels for the people you see on the street, or even service industry workers and teachers and whatnot, they would first be dirt cheap for tech. How many more tech workers would move to SF or start their companies here if they heard it was cheap now? That’s how deep the demand goes. That’s all the demand that needs to be satiated before market rates come down to where they could reverse homelessness.
That’s why tech can’t just pass the buck to NIMBYS or pretend like this is any other city. We are creating some of the most valuable companies in the world here right now and it generally helps your prospects to co-locate. That creates very exceptional demand conditions.
But I feel like that is the way SFBA will grow. Every city has its secret sauce, for SFBA it is tech. Instead of fighting it, I can imagine a scenario where the concentration of Tech leads to a transformation of the area to be more like NYC. Or maybe it will take a different direction.
As naive as it sounds, I still believe in Tech as a force for good (not Big Tech necessarily). I moved here from Austin, and folks there talk about how the tech industry is growing, but its still Satellite offices for Big Tech. The kind of talent I see in SFBA is staggering.
I think a big reason Benioff came around is that he’s taking a long view. Perhaps you could even draw a connection with the maturity of Salesforce as a company vs young startups whose current teams might exit in under 10 years. Benioff got his whole team on board not only out of altruism, but by noting that homelessness was seriously threatening Saleforce’s future in the city.
I don't have an opinion on Prop C. The thrust of my argument was more around prop 13.
Is it perhaps possible that there might be a distinction to be made between things that are defensive strategies and things that are factually incorrect?
The government (and the voters) of San Francisco has reacted very badly to the influx of new people, which is happening in the context of decades of poor zoning and housing policy.
I also don't buy the argument in the article you linked, because there are many other cities in the world that have successfully solved increased demand by building more housing. For example, the Tokyo metropolitan area has a population nearly the size of California's in a fairly small area but rent is cheaper than in San Francisco and it's more affordable for working-class people.
The mayor of San Francisco and a bunch of other individuals and businesses, including tech companies, who don't want to throw more money away pursuing the same bad policies as before.
There were also major tech CEOs in favor of the measure, including Benioff who pushed hard for it.
I predict that it will have very little impact on the homelessness problem or housing affordability in San Francisco.
I love how you think it’s the government’s job to solve homelessness but then don’t want to fund the government.
That's an uncharitable interpretation of my views and I don't think you're arguing in good faith.
I have no problem funding good government policies. San Francisco's policies are not good. The homeless services are a total administrative and bureaucratic disaster and pumping more money into that system is not going to help homeless people.
OVERSIGHT & ACCOUNTABILITY
This initiative requires an Oversight Committee comprised of nine experts on homelessness, supportive housing, mental illness, substance use disorder, and development, who will recommend funding priorities, promote transparency and cultural competence, and produce regular reports about who has been served by this fund and what still needs to be done for the Board of Supervisors. The body will also conduct a needs assessment to direct recommendations. Four seats will be appointed by the Board of Supervisors, four seats appointed by the Mayor, and one seat by the Controller’s office.
Funding will be allocated into three City agencies: the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, the Mayor’s Office on Housing and Community Development, and the Department of Public Health. That funding contracted out to non-profits will be carefully overseen by contracting managers in said department. Contract managers will carefully scrutinize budgets, check receipts, payroll records, perform audits and ensure funding is spent appropriately. They will also review units of service, types of services rendered, and review client satisfaction surveys. Contracting organizations will only get paid for actual services rendered. Funding for programs that are city run will have similar oversight and accountability measures.[1]
I will not accuse you of making a bad faith argument, but it’s pretty clear to anyone who actually looks that there are accountability mechanisms. The root problem is that SF spends a fraction of what other major cities do per homeless person, because budgets are stretched thin keeping people housed. SF spends just $3.8K per homeless person.[2] “No accountability” is a political lie calculated to appeal to people’s biases about government.
[1] https://www.ourcityourhomesf.org/san_francisco_prop_c_2018_e...
[2] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Bu...
Your facts may be right, but I don't automatically draw the conclusion that they equal "disaster."
But it's also extremely likely that there is duplication of effort that could achieve better results if things were more coordinated.
Throwing more money into such an opaque and uncoordinated system is a bad idea. I'd much rather build a better system and defund this one.
In the years since she wrote that she has investigated SF homelessness deeply. She's detailed how very little is actually spent on the SF homeless population ($3.8K per homeless person).[1] Because it turns out the cost of keeping at-risk people from losing their housing is high due to.. you guessed it, skyrocketing costs due to the tech boom.
Prop C addresses this fundamental funding problem and details specific accountability measures, which I've quoted upthread.
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Bu...
Are they not open to foi requests?
I don't mean to be so repetitive, I've just heard the line "SF government is inefficient" many times but have yet to come across the kind of evidence I could take to a city council meeting and demand change with.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-19/square-s-...
Again this is just another superficially plausible sounding argument (along with “no accountability”, etc.) that’s just cover for opposing anything suggesting the tech industry bears some responsibility for exacerbating the homelessness situation and should pay to help.
[1] https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/SF-Citi-video-plugs-...
Meanwhile the dude that owned the biggest tower in SF supported it... It pretty much is the perfect example of my post.
They didn't dump oil in the gulf. They didn't use shady laws to buy majority shares in a public Telecom utility. they didn't exploit the land with unsustainable crops. They sold ads on websites.
So hence my theory - any issues caused by companies doing well without even being evil while doing well, is solely the fault of the government for failing to legislate properly.
E.g., article cites claim that two-thirds of downtown new housing development is vacant, yet ignores the source article's immediate next sentence: "thousands of new workers... are choosing to live in other neighborhoods." Most Seattleites don't want to live downtown; they prefer to live in surrounding neighborhoods: Capitol Hill, Fremont, Ballard, the Central District, etc. But those neighborhoods are mostly single-family zoning, so existing residents are either being displaced or seeing huge property tax increases (if they're lucky). A more distributed growth plan would alleviate this.
Also re: "insatiable demand for a necessity". My demand for housing is one apartment and I'm fortunately sated. How many apartments do you need?
A lot of people believe it. The idea that this dystopia is the tech industry's sole fault has common currency, especially in young-and-progressive circles.
Among other things, it means not really having to come to terms with decades of policy failure. It also means not having to examine how local government seems to keep failing, such as with public transit or public restrooms.
Tech is an excellent newcomer and outsider. This makes it collectively an ideal scapegoat. Which is not to say the tech industry is innocent! But it is to say the way blame is apportioned could be better aligned with reality.
There are maybe a few of other factors (some touched on in the article) that amplify the criticism if they aren't causal. The rate of change brought about by tech feels faster than others before it. Houston grew into a square of choking freeways with the oil industry; while SV has old roots the explosion happened in a couple of decades. The other factor is the concentration of the industry makes it a more tangible issue to the people effected. You can understand Big Oil is destroying the world but it's harder to picture than a Google bus in front of you in traffic.
Some other things that struck me about living here.
- SF is cold! (yes, this coming from a canadian) In Toronto you get "real" seasons and snow during winter, but SF (especially in the areas closer to the ocean) is blasted with cold wind and fog year-round so there's really never a hot season. In addition to that, SF has its infamous micro-weathers: it might be foggy on one patch of the city, rain on another and be sunny (but still windy) on yet another part of town, all at the same time.
- Food scene: SF does a lot of spins on food. If I were to describe food here, I'd have to say it's generally "gimmicky". It's very common to see people lining up for unique eye-catching things like asian+mexican fusion, dashi-broth ramen and taiyaki ice cream, but finding good traditional chinese or greek or korean food or even a half-decent shawarma is tough. Also, having to wait in line for 30+ mins almost everywhere detracts a lot from dining experiences. Many places are also ridiculously cramped. I've never had to walk _through the kitchen_ to get to a restroom anywhere else before.
- LGBT community: Toronto has a large LGBT community and one of the largest parades in North America, but people generally don't try to be too outrageous. In the one year I've been to SF, I've ran into butt-naked people numerous times (in contexts ranging from them just walking down the street to them running the Bay-to-Breakers marathon). Also ran into a leather fetish gear festival around costco a while back. Nothing really against that sort of stuff, but can be awkward to inadvertently run into it when you're just out and about with the kids on a random weekend.
- Geography and nature: Within SF, there are gorgeous places scattered throughout the city (e.g. views from Russian Hill, around Randall museum, presidio area). If you have a car, there are also a ton of amazing state parks in the surrounding areas, from redwood forests to beaches. You can see wild sea life up close at fitzgerald marine reserve and even spot whales at pigeon point.
We need a word for the disappointment experienced upon realizing that the food in front of you has been optimized for Instagram and not for you.
It takes a while, but exploring neighborhoods can be really rewarding. I rarely wait for a table, and if you do have to wait there is usually another place right next door. Not every place is spectacular, but the overall food quality here is decent. Finally, avoid anywhere with more than 20-30 items on a menu (Thank you Gordon Ramsey).
There is another (realer imo) Asian area on Clement and Geary over in the Richmond that has authentic food all over. Japan town is good, but stay away from most of the tourist trap that is the Grant street Chinatown.
But this city does suck for Mediterranean.
Honestly, I'd even take an everyday American Chinese restaurant over one of those yuppie restaurants that sell overpriced Chinese-ish food aimed at white yuppies (the Americanization bothers me less than the catering to the yuppie community... regular old working-class American Chinese food is actually pretty tasty, even if it's not my favorite, which is more than I can say for Yuppie Chinese).
I know right! There was one time I went to one restaurant with a good rating, and the line up was so long we ended up just waddling over to an inconspicuous Japanese place next door, to discover some pretty decent traditional style service and food.
I did find a number of chinese/korean restaurants that clearly cater to actual chinese/koreans, but the cultural density is so low that unfortunately they've mostly fell short compared to the quality you can get in the various chinese/korean neighbourhoods in Toronto.
You've forgotten the few weeks in the spring and fall where the Central Valley-powered air conditioning turns off and suddenly SF becomes Palo Alto. :)
I generally love the taste and diversity of food in SF, but I feel like restaurant owners don't value their customers, nor their customer's time when they open a restaurant like this.
My new rule is: if the wait is 30 minutes or more, I go somewhere else. No exceptions. Honestly, I've fallen out of touch with many friends because of this rule, but my time is worth more than that. I actively try to patronize the "critically underrated" places that are good, but have no line down the block.
My New Yorker friends also think that queuing 30+ minutes for a trendy place is normal.
the only real solution for the "too popular" problem is to raise the prices, which might satisfy you but enrage others who are then priced out.
Here's how that plays out: if enough people start to do that, someone will start a system for sharing information to support them, the discovered places will become trendy and either crowded or expensive, rinse, and repeat (actually, you are already in that cycle—that’s how lots of trendy places happen now.) As long as the Bay Area is awash in money, the same process driving real estate prices through the roof is going to do the same thing to dining prices wherever there is quality except where obscurity creates hidden bargains. But to exploit that you'll need to spend more time than you'd spend waiting in line at known places finding the hidden gems, and then finding new ones as other people discover the one you've found and the obscurity you've been exploiting is replaced with visibility and success.
I waited in line in Paris at both Obermama (pizza & cocktails) and Kotteri Naritake (butter ramen with very few seats). I've been told to come back in an hour at a favorite spot (corsican food with very few seats).
It definitely happens elsewhere.
There's also obviously the separate fast-food and fast-casual markets that focus on rapidly cycling customers with minimal delay and much lower service levels; they still try to be full as much as possible which still means queuing at peak times, but the queues tend to be shorter in time or just as deep (or deeper), and tend to involve actual physical, rather than merely logical, queues.
[0] http://www.worldcitiescultureforum.com/data/number-of-restau...
Eh, that seems pretty generous to me still. I won't wait more than five minutes or so. (i.e. if a table has already asked for bills and I'm just waiting for them to pay and clear out.) I'll give a bit more leeway if there's a seated area where my friends and I can get served drinks while we wait.
During B2B a couple years ago I actually asked an officer about that. Apparently it's 100% legal to be naked in SF, as long as you're not being too sexual... I don't know what the actual line is legally, but that's what I was told.
> SF is cold! (yes, this coming from a canadian)
It's kind of interesting that as much as I love cold weather, I wouldn't want to live any place where it's actually cold as a matter of course. Why? Air conditioning. In warm places like Dallas and Vegas, air con is everywhere. Central A/C is in all the houses, and every business is air conditioned. In cooler places, that doesn't exist. I've heard horror stories from friends who moved to SF/SV and can't find a place to live with air conditioning. And people will say you don't need it, but a) heatwaves still exist, and one heatwave will fuck up your entire week, and b) they underestimate my lack of tolerance for heat. I blast my air con at 60°F even in the winter :)
> It's very common to see people lining up for unique eye-catching things like asian+mexican fusion, dashi-broth ramen and taiyaki ice cream, but finding good traditional chinese or greek or korean food or even a half-decent shawarma is tough
Honestly, I've been put off of SF a very long time ago, but if I hadn't already, this would do it.
The older I get, the more I find white people's spins on ethnic food to be just plain annoying. It's both more expensive and not as tasty as the real thing.
Here's a pretty recent example for me: in a suburb of Dallas, they recently opened an upscale food hall called Legacy Hall. I was really excited about it when it first opened, and I tried it a few times. Every time I ate there, I ended up leaving unsatisfied for the most part. Why? Because so much of their food was some kind of ethnic or regional food all gussied up by and for white yuppies. Case in point, they had one Asian-style noodle joint there called the Monkey King Noodle Company. I ordered the dan dan noodles, because I love dan dan noodles, and I've ordered it several times at hole-in-the-wall Sichuan restaurants. What I got was some white guy's idea of what dan dan noodles are. It was awful. And it was way more expensive than it should have been. And that's not the only kind of this thing I've encountered at Legacy Hall... I've had a few similar experiences there, but this is just the one I picked as an example.
But of course Dallas is a wonderful city, and there are hole-in-the-wall restaurants of every ethnicity here. I have one coworker, of Filipina descent, who I go out to lunch with once a week or so, and we mostly go to all different kinds of hole-in-the-wall Asian places of pretty much every ethnicity we can find. And while we're in the car, we talk so much smack about overpriced "Asian" restaurants that cater to white yuppies... it's so cathartic to have someone to talk to about how frustrating this is (TBH, I'm a Jew who grew up on Chinese food, understands Japanese well enough to translate as a hobby, and has never identified with white people).
> LGBT community: Toronto has a large LGBT community and one of the largest parades in North America, but people generally don't try to be too outrageous. In the one year I've been to SF, I've ran into butt-naked people numerous times (in contexts ranging from them just walking down the street to them running the Bay-to-Breakers marathon). Also ran into a leather fetish gear festival around costco a while back. Nothing really against that sort of stuff, but can be awkward to inadvertently run into it when you're just out and about with the kids on a random weekend.
I'm a transgender lesbian, and my main goal in life is to assimilate into ordinary life as a girl and maybe play around with a few chicks here and there. I've felt out of place in a lot of online LGBT communities because so many of them are dominated by those who... well, who aren't like me. People with radical political beliefs, very distinct "alternative" looks, who are thoroughly immersed in queer culture, etc. Now, I don't have a problem with those people existing (and in fact one good way to get on my bad side is to tell me they make the community "look bad"), but I do feel alone because so few people in the community are like me. And then I started getting involved in my local LGBT community and became a regular at a trans support group. And most of the people I met there are a lot like me, and it felt great to finally be part of a community I identify with. Going to that group felt like coming home, and I've since pulled out of most online trans communities in favor of becoming more involved with my local community.
Again, I don't have a problem with the queerer or more alternative parts of the community, and I'd never say they make the community look bad, and I certainly won't invalidate their identities, but I don't identify with them, and I just feel isolated when I'm surrounded by them, which is what's happened in most online communities, and I'm more comfortable when I'm with people who share my sensibilities and life goals.
From what I understand, SF is filled with the segments of the community that I don't identify with, and so I probably wouldn't get involved with the LGBT community there.
I read an article a while back about a couple of americans who went to china and opened a "chinese" food restaurant because real chinese food looked nothing like the americanized "chinese" delivery food and they missed their sweet-&-sour chicken balls and fortune cookies. It flopped hard... until they rebranded and called it "american comfort food". It's always amusing to learn about the quirky dissonances between expectation of people from different cultures.
> SF is filled with the segments of the community that I don't identify with
I'm married and straight so I don't have much contact with the LGBT community in SF, but for some reason the few times have always been somewhat awkward. Imagine looking at marathon runners with funny costumes and then having to explain to your 5/yo not to be pointing and yelling at the naked guy with the rainbow cape. Another time my wife took my daughter to what she thought was a generic kids activity at a library and it turned out to be a transgender seminar, dumbed down to kids vocab level.
I've also found the gay parade in particular to be a bit surreal: the SF parade seemed more like a corporate sponsorship show and had a distinct "spectacle" feel, nothing like the communal street party feel of the Toronto Pride parade.
It almost feels like the culture here is that LGBT identity is this unusual curious thing to be on display on a similar level to the animal shows at the library. Just feels very weird, coming from Toronto, where people are generally nonchalant/indifferent towards sexual orientation.
The housing scarcity and high rents are caused by politics, by zoning, by not allowing to build enough new homes. It's sad that techies are blamed for the problem created by the politicians and, ultimately, by the voters.
Especially foreign tech workers, such as the author, bear no blame, as they cannot even vote in any US elections.
Personally I can emphasize with the sentiment. Even though I don’t think that 20-something programmers in Google buses are personally responsible for the disparity, but the brandless tinted Google buses are a powerful symbol for new class system.
I’ve never seen so much poverty and homelessness before. There’s many major streets where wearing open shoes would be a big no-no, because of used needles lying around in plain sight. Seeing people shooting up on Market Street is pretty normal.
This is a political decision, or set of decisions: https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/. Anytime we want to, we can build as much housing as people want to live in; we just make doing so illegal right now.
You certainly easily can: effectively free (subsidized by tax payers).
The house-the-homeless programs run during the Bush and Obama administrations dramatically reduced chronic homelessness in most of the US, pushing it to a record low per capita.
San Francisco is one of the wealthiest places on earth. They intentionally choose to allow the human rights violation of mass, particularly chaotic homelessness to continue in the city. Morally they own it, period. There are obvious, highly effective solutions that have been used elsewhere.
That's not building cheap housing that drug users can afford. It's just getting someone else to pay.
Deinstitutionalization has contributed to SF's homeless problem, as many mentally handicapped people self medicate with illegal substances.
Where do you put all this new infrastructure and who pays for it? Existing residents?
More housing is necessary but insufficient.
Yes. That's how urban living works. Current residents pay taxes, those taxes are used to rebuild/enhance the city infrastructure, which brings in more residents and more tax revenue.
And I think increasing the capacity of the sewer system is sort of an assumed point when it's literally a requirement for increased high-density housing.
But don’t point that out here! It’s not enough to agree that the area needs more housing—you aparently have to also profess that it’s obviously the only solution, and that there are no trade offs or complexity to consider.
Remote work, distributed working, all these ideas are what could lead a worldwide trend to distribute work, people, resources more efficiently.
Also while not destroying history (old buildings/neighborhoods that are worth preserving) and nature (parks, trees, etc.).
It's pretty widely known with in the transgender community that trans women are overwhelmingly more likely to be software engineers than have pretty much any other profession.
Also San Diego has tons of homeless too, and it has none of the tech scene. People are homeless in California because A) It has weather you can be outside in year round, especially in SoCal B) Our government is corrupt and is the cause of a serious housing crisis to keep prices inflated C) Cost of living is inflated by the housing crisis.
Midwestern? It's as far west as you can get.
And they're not towns - they're cities, all merged into one massive continuous urban sprawl for 80 miles around the bay.
NYC is definitely more of a "city that never sleeps" than most but its hours are not the norm for most major world cities.
https://www.hot-dinners.com/Features/Hot-Dinners-recommends/...
https://www.standard.co.uk/go/london/restaurants/midnight-fe...
Come on.
(SJ native here)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town#United_States
CA does not legally acknowledge any distinction between towns and cities. However, many states require a "town" to have fewer than 1,000, 2,000, 6,000, etc., residents (the bound varying by state). Union City has ~75,000 people, which would prevent it from being considered a small town in the majority of states that distinguish rigorously between towns and cities.
Cities are urban. They have congestion, nightlife with noticeable quantities people on the streets in the evening, chance encounters as you walk around, and a general feeling of lots of stuff happening within a walkable distance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_government_in_California...
Source: I grew up in the middle of it.
This is good in that those without voice are not simply trampled over. This is bad in that you probably cannot hold someone long enough for effective treatment if they continuously express the desire to leave.
Involuntarily restraining someone has a very high bar--harm to self or others. Rightfully, "being a nuisance" doesn't really cross that bar.
Someone with Alzheimer's and no family is a good test--when do you force them into a facility? And what kind of facility? And how do you pay for that? And is that actually an improvement to their life?
But I agree with you for the most part. Basically all of the bay built in the last 70 years is garbage. As the writer of "Ghostride the Volvo" put it, Fremont's just a parking lot with a mayor.
with a vibrant culture
You can definitely think of a senator or congressmen who is "for the banks" or "for pharmaceuticals" even those who are "pro steel union" or "pro teachers union" but you really can't find any of note who promote an interest that can be specifically tied to what developers want. This is taking to account that developers are not a monolith and probably span a wide variety of political ideology, but I can't think of a single issue, whether or not it's in the majority opinion that is being advocated for in government.
San Francisco in general is an interesting beacon, the city itself is not that large, and I would expect that there are enough full time developers in the city who live there who can at least get someone on the city council, and yet.. it really does not seem to be the case that there is someone who you can readily point to as an advocate. Am I drastically mistaken? Would love to hear further perspectives from folks in the bay.
The most effective form of government is the one that is most local to you, when will developers put their weight on the scale?
In my experience, amongst software developers, contempt for politics is common and the politics that is most popular tends to be hyper-individualistic and unacquainted with the idea of common interest. It's almost as if it were optimized to make developers happy well-paid cogs in a machine that is transforming society without their direction.
Well, everything you mention are organizations with figureheads you can call up and ask what they think. They can also give you money so you can pursue their ideas. I'm not sure who a politician would talk to if they wanted to be pro developer. I'm not sure who would give you money for being pro developer.
This is part of my point, I can't think of any organization, no matter the size that is "pro-developer" this can be anything from advocating for the removal of non-competes, codifying some open source things into law, IP law reform, tax write offs for things like accelerators.. anything.
> I'm not sure who would give you money for being pro developer.
Developers would! Being a developer in America puts you firmly in the upper middle class nationwide. I think the nature of most developers is to organize in more decentralized and informal ways. IRC, mailing lists, github orgs, etc. At some point though we will need to realize that we are apart of the mainstream (our companies definitely have) and that there is a voice and mechanism of action to exert that voice to affect things.
The type of people that end up spearheading campaigns and taking leadership positions tend to be too busy with new priorities to continue previous activities. Managing staff, setting and achieving goals across a variety of disciplines, and ...leading may take the place of the inspiring moments that help justify their existence as a developer, especially overtime. It takes a specific type of person to want to take or make that change.
Though software folk are exploding in numbers (source: am one), perhaps further care and attention is needed in balancing the social skills, creativity, and growth of tenacity of those that are attempting to improve their development abilities. Particularly if we want to create techies that are smart as a whip and can also hold public office effectively.
More people who break the stereotypical mold are moving into engineering, I think this trend will lead to the rise of something resembling a union and special interest groups.
Besides what's already in the article (which was definitely the biggest shock) I also felt like:
- Nightlife is boring, not much to do for a city of about a million people and the 2am alcohol limit.
- Uninteresting architecture-wise
- Dating life sucks for a heterosexual male who's used to 50/50 men/women ratio in bars & clubs.
- Being a hipster is the norm.
Admittedly, I did very little research before moving. And it wasn't all bad, I loved driving my bike in the nearby hills and the work was interesting and well paid.
Aren't we tech types obsessed with removing single points of failure?
Aren't we moving past "you must sit in a specific chair so your manager can have specific interactions with you, in person"?
I know there's remote work out there; believe me, I know. But read stuff like this and browse the "who's hiring" threads, laden with ONSITE, and wonder when I'll finally be able to sever the link between the skill in my brain and sitting in that one specific chair in that one specific building in that one specific town.
Face-to-face communication provides much higher "bandwidth" than text-based.
In person is much easier. There are shared experiences we can have. We can randomly bump into each other and have small reminder-type experiences. It's easier to get a sense of what kind of person we're working with, and that becomes an elevated sense of trust. This all matters and it's difficult to do remotely.
I've done both. I prefer onsite. Currently I'm remote and honestly it's a struggle, and regular onsite visits are a must to maintain those trust bonds.
Not everyone is willing to invest in that effort.
It would almost certainly be better if I were sitting in a chair at my office, but since I can't, remote work is the next best thing, and as long as both my boss and I are willing to work pretty damn hard to keep it going, it'll keep working.
But I can totally see how some teams would not want to go through the extra effort. I like to think I'm worth it, but my team got to figure that out while I worked on-site for some time before leaving (a year). It's hard to roll the dice on someone you don't know (a new hire).
I think the author hits an important point that, if nothing else, it's important to be aware of ourselves. It may not be my or your personal fault that things are the way they are, but we're living in a system that substantially rewards what we do over everyone else around us. I would posit that this also harms us, as the author notes - a person making six figures with a busy job can easily feel like money is just going through their fingers like water.
This is part of why I'm going back to school to study economics. I want to live a rich life, which to me doesn't mean having substantially more than other people. I want to live in an enriched community where everyone who plays an important part can live comfortably, raise a family if they want to, have savings, pay a reasonable amount for housing, etc..
There's more to life than computers. <3
I used to live a couple hours south of SF. Once I went to a conference at Mosconi Center that started early, and got a big shock just driving there a bit after dawn. Right off of the freeway there was a tent city on concrete sidewalks. The filth and poverty were overwhelming to me. I felt like a slack jawed hick, not realizing that this kind of mass naked misery was so nearby. I saw the oft mentioned shit and needles and condoms strewn everywhere. On foot I made the mistake of meeting a homeless guy's eyes, who then chased me while screaming threats for two blocks.
And this was around '95, and the consensus is that it's gotten a lot worse. That people can ignore that after a couple of months of exposure is a testament to human plasticity. I imagine that if it were fresh to everyone every day people would have to either flee or actually do something about it. It's hard to imagine what an individual could do that would be effective.
If only there were a tech solution for reversing the invisibility. Articles like this can help a little but they're probably easier to ignore than the homeless themselves.
"This Insane Battle To Block a New Apartment Building Explains Why San Francisco and Other Cities Are So Expensive" https://reason.com/reasontv/2018/12/27/san-francisco-mission...
I get the impression 30% to 50% of the city is that way (way old) and most of the rest is like 70s-80s stuff that really needs to be torn down and rebuilt. Some of the more modern buildings say down in China Basin might be more sound proof and energy efficient? No idea.
I think it's a bit narcissistic to believe that tech has somehow caused all of SF's problems and unique qualities. Healthcare is a bigger and faster growing industry, and the homeless situation is caused by lots of factors both supply (zoning/regulation) and demand (tech/finance/healthcare workers).
There is a veneer of tech-induced culture in SF, but the true character and complexity of the city is caused by much, much more.
Was pleasant to read, but also informative, and balanced.
Well done!
Internet money is displacing ordinary people, i.e. children of house owning residents who can't land a well paid job, and people in rental units.
If you have a family you can't expect all children to get well paid jobs, you can't expect your parents to be around being good grandparents after they retire and if you are born in the area you can't expect your childhood/teen/20s friends to stay around for the same reason - not everyone can get high paying jobs.
I mean, it's not a nice community if the people you grow up with have to move because they can't stay competitive enough.
When I worked in Palo Alto (as a high paid tech worker displacing old folks ...), I didn't think about this at all. It was first afterwards I realized that ordinary people were missing and there were very few children over all.
It is perfectly reasonable to state as fact that the predominant economic paradigm of the city has caused dystopia, despite there being other causal factors or caveats baked in.
edit: or do I become the predominant economic paradigm?
I crunched the numbers before we moved to SF and even paying 10x more rent for 3x more salary worked out ok.
Did I mention, that we should also be able to save most of my wife’s income or just fritter it away on vacations? I’m no special snowflake any senior developer who lives in my metro area could easily do the same thing.
Everyone I know in SF is still renting.
How about trying those saving strategies outside of the bay while still on a very good tech salary?
My current apartment would also be incomprehensible in the Bay Area.
Luxury 1 bd, new construction, walking distance to the office, pool, Friday night car service, 24/7 concierge, pet friendly, on-site maintenance, and more for under $2k. They also threw in a free month of rent, no deposit... I'm stashing away plenty in savings too.
Big tech has expanded beyond the Bay and will continue to do so. They've realized they can pay the same or a bit less and the employees can keep more. They also get to attract people that don't want to live in SF, the Bay, or CA in general. Not to mention state tax incentives that states are handing out.
They're literally offering for people to move out of our non-Bay office with the same package. Those staying are paying a die-hard Californian tax and it is an expensive one.
This. So horrible. :(
The Working Class is moving into states like Texas for a reason despite California being progressive
And, yes, incredibly interesting and well paying job that has set me up for retirement long before I hit 65 now matter where I'll end up (not that I'd want to retire soon because... interesting job.)
When you're part of the group who got lucky, living in the Bay Area is really not so bad.
Funny, this was the first thing I also noticed about the Bay Area when I moved out here years ago: the billboards. Where I came from (Deep South, Florida panhandle), all the billboards said things like “Homeschoolers for Jesus” and “Remember not to shake your baby,” and when I landed in SFO I was greeted by billboards for Portal 2, some Java framework, and the unbiquitous iPhone billboards. Definitely felt more in my element here!
Many downtown workers (including me) have to step over or around garbage, feces, used needles, tents, sleeping bags, passed out junkies/drunks, and so on, every time they come to work or leave their office. Not to mention the odors.
When I came to SF, I couldn't help but stare at stark poverty. I came from a much smaller place that lacked all of these problems. But what you described is true; after a few months your brain normalizes to the dystopia, and that in itself is scary.
I've been in the bay area 12 years now, and can't imagine moving out of California, but at the same time feel that things here are out of balance and somehow 'wrong'. But I also feel like I don't know where I'd go. We talk about Vancouver, or San Diego, but realistically I don't even know what I'd do in those cities.
That's.... pretty horrible, really.
Being from a third world country i have never seen human waste on the street. I think something is very wrong in SF.
Also, earlier this week i read this [1] twitter thread from Casey Muratori on the topic, looks relevant.
[1] https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1080580967268376577
People everywhere, bad drivers, lots of arrogance etc, but now looking back there many great moments that I kind of miss.
One of them is that I loved travelling and exploring in the US. There is just always something to do. Also you meet nice people almost everywhere. So it was quite easy to make friends instantly.
If the visa situation wasn't so bad, I think I'd go back now that I took a break from the Bay Area Craziness.
To me living in Europe makes more sense (more stable and secure), but life in the US is somehow more fun. That is until you run out of money (be it because of medical bills or because you got sued...)
yes, European countries tend to have much better safety nets, but they also come with significantly higher taxes. as a software engineer in the states, you can also expect to get paid about twice as much for the same work. there may be some good reasons to prefer Europe, but they probably aren't economic.
"There is a lot of money, but not a lot of wealth."