San Francisco’s Slow-Motion Suicide
nationalreview.com
nationalreview.com
Trash everywhere downtown, human feces/needles/smell of urine all over downtown & SOMA, depressing mix of aggressive and zombie-like homeless, very few kids/families, very few minorities (especially African-Americans), barely functioning public transportation system, high rents forcing six-figure earners to live with 2 roommates and still pay $2500/month, 400 sq ft studios going for $700k, every other non-tech worker is an Uber driver/Instacart Shopper/DoorDash delivery person
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-re...
I live in Atlanta where the minority population is much higher all around and I don't get the sense at all that there's rampant racism or discrimination.
Is this problem unique to the Bay Area or is this largely white guilt?
But to you question, diversity in tech has little to do with the ethnic makeup of the Bay Area. This is a transient town...people come here to work from all over and it's a completely separate issue.
Back in the mid-20th century, the Fillmore was a thriving black community, with around 50k black residents in a relatively central part of the city.
The city, however, considered it "blighted." Too many homeless people, too much drug use, too much property and violent crime.
And so the SF Redevelopment Agency decided to knock down a bunch of blighted Victorians, relocate the black population, and replace the Victorians with modern apartment buildings.
That was the beginning of the end of African American SF. Obviously some relocated to other areas of the city, but just as many left for other pastures.
Housing policies since then have hardly helped the situation, but YIMBY types need to understand the history of redevelopment both so they don't make the same mistakes and so they have empathy for when poor folks in a community are skeptical of their promised land.
While true, this elides over a pretty large issue with minorities in tech. In general, the "transient after college" phase, where high potential students move to high potential areas is a privileged position that most people aren't able to participate in for many reasons. Maybe its because your parents (or brothers/sisters/nieces/nephews etc) are struggling and you need to take care of them day today, maybe its because you already have student loans up to the hilt and feel that living at home is a less risky proposition than moving across the country to a place where rent is going to be 2x the size of any paycheck you've ever received, maybe its because you feel the community you come from needs you more than you need a tesla. In general, the types of people who have these types of issues that drive them not to migrate are going to be high performing, but lower wealth, and thus on balance more likely to be non-white all else being equal. IMO, a great way to help make "tech" a more diverse industry would be to open offices in Atlanta, a city with a large black population, and a very good university.
She said that you find just as many racists everywhere, but she “appreciates” the (urban) Southern racists ones more because they don’t try to hide, so she knows where she stands.
Some of the best racism I received was in your face “sand n-word” type — it was easier to digest and joke about after the fact.
I've heard this exact statement in a Dave Chappelle standup bit. I've always taken it to mean that bigots in some areas are simply familiar enough with the area's politics, history and justice system to feel comfortable saying openly bigoted things without fear of repercussion.
What does this even mean?
???
Uh, you don't notice any racial bickering in Atlanta?
Not saying it's only in Atlanta. It's everywhere, all over the nation really. I'm just wondering where in Atlanta you live that racial bickering is absent in public discourse?
I am really interested in this. Could you provide some links, please?
There were also redlining practices and things like razing and redeveloping the predominantly black Fillmore making it a neighborhood the previous residents could no longer afford.
https://www.epi.org/publication/the-color-of-law-a-forgotten...
Long story short:
Richmond grew during WWII because it was a large ship building yard for the pacific fleet. Lots of white and black people moved to Richmond from the South and East during this time. After the war, the ship building stopped, and the workers needed to get new jobs. There was a large auto plant that opened up in Milpitas (near San Jose), that hired a lot of the workers, both black and white. There were a lot of "whites only" suburbs built near the Milpitas plant and a lot of the white ship workers moved there, bought houses, had short commutes to work, and built wealth through housing appreciation. As white folks left the Richmond community and black folks remained, the lack of political power held by black folks at the time (Jim Crow laws, discrimination, etc) lead to disinvestment in the richmond community (poorer schools, roads didn't get repaired, leading to lower property values etc). The disinvestment and community decline made it more difficult for the black community to move away, because they didn't have any housing wealth compared to neighboring communities (and many communities at the time were "white only"). Additionally, the black workers commuting to Milpitas to work spent 2.5 hrs/day commuting, while the white workers spent like 15 minutes, so thats 2 hours and 15 minutes every day for 25 years that white fathers could spend at home teaching their kids to read/focusing on their education, improving their house, building social connections/capital etc that the black fathers didn't have. That impact on the next generation compounds over time and makes a material impact on the potential of the next generation.
"Many communities were white only" is a crock; in fact, Milpitas in the 1970s had higher black propensity than did Fremont to the north or NE San Jose to the south. Both Milpitas and Ayer High schools had more black students than Piedmont Hills to the south. The foothills tended to be pricey and almost exclusively white and Jewish, but that was economic rather than code segregation.
By the 1970s, production at the plant spiraled downward, shifts were cut, abd there were always more workers than hours.
In the context of this argument, I think it's worth distinguishing between private and public actions. People have the right to be racist, governments don't.
When you say "minority population," are you referring to white people or some other minority group in Atlanta, or are you referring to black people, who constitute the majority ethnic group in Atlanta?
1) I don’t know what “aggressive political rhetoric” is, but it comes off as being dismissive of political opinions you disagree with
2) SF the city is a small part of the SF Bay Area. There are lots of black folks living near SF
3) Be very careful making projections about racism from your experience of Atlanta. Atlanta is the catch basin for successful black business for a large fraction of the south. I was born in Atlanta, and was really surprised when people would describe the south as racist, because my experience of race in Atlanta was so positive. But you don’t have to get very far out of the city to experience poorly concealed racism.
3. I use Atlanta because that's where I live today. I've lived in Texas, Hawaii, Korea, Maryland, Wisconsin, Ohio, Alabama, and Georgia.
1. Large Asian population. The SF companies I've worked at often had 30-45% Asian workforce. In theory this should be a good thing as far as diversity goes (and I have had the privilege of learning from and getting to know people coming from very different societies on a personal level, most of them Asian). But for a variety of reasons I'm not going to dig into, Asians don't count as "diverse" anymore.
2. Overwhelmingly left leaning workforce means that the prevailing liberal attitudes are amplified and go largely unquestioned. This sometimes even manifests itself as the organized exclusion of those that don't harbor the same politics: https://www.fastcompany.com/3067152/lessons-in-techs-past-di...
3. Perhaps as a result of #2, many in the SF Bay area aren't exploring non-discriminatory explanations as to why there are few African Americans in Bay area tech companies. First off, the Black population is not very big in the Bay area. Less than 2% of mountain view's population is black. Overall the Bay area is 6.7% black, about half that of the country as a whole. Couple this with lower rates of educational attainment beyond high school (which is usually necessary for software development roles) and it's not hard to see how a lower black population in Bay area tech roles can happen even absent discrimination in hiring. But saying these things to my coworkers would probably adversely affect my career, so the prevailing narrative of discrimination in hiring is left unchallenged.
This results in some interesting behavior. Tech roles with lower barrier to entry like help desk support are now nearly entirely black, Hispanic, or female. We recently recategorized physical security as a "tech" role (ostensibly because physical security is an important part of infosec) and now easily 70%+ of our physical security staff is black. This has sort of backfired in a sense, the few black developers I know report being consistently mistaken for security or help desk personnel.
What percent of SF Bay area tech workers grew up in the Bay area? If it is not high, it is not clear that the Bay area's general population racial demographics are relevant.
It's true though, if more of us went to local government sessions, we could probably just utterly dominate the discourse and reject a lot of NIMBYisms outright, and that'd probably result in a lot of political changes.
I myself regret bitterly how much I let my parent's culture influence my opinions on this, and it's only as I get older that I fully appreciate the many toxic and counter-productive ways my fundamental christian socialization has influenced me even as I've struggled to move more left throughout the course of my life.
Most of us actually exert very little influence in local politics, precisely because we're here for the work. I'm in a tiny minority that's decided to "settle down" and not retreat "back home" once I've got a quarter million in investments and another 100k in cash.
And in fact, I think very few of my peers are super into local politics. Even I'm guilty of being somewhat disengaged until recently, and I'm trying to make up for that now in Daly City.
The property owners moving in sync are what dominate a lot of features in this town, and very few "hackers from this site" are actually in that club. Even the rare post-exit folks like me. The truth is that they have a lot more to gain by keeping the status quo than itinerant tech workers have to lose by just leaving rather than dealing with the difficult problem of entrenched NIMBYism.
I'm dealing with that now in my area and it is AGONIZING to sit there listening to some old man or woman go on about how Asians and Brazilians ruining the community and stealing their parking when they're the ones renting out 3 homes in the first place.
I don't think it's inevitable though, so the question is - how do we stop it? We have some of the brighter minds in tech on this forum, what are your thoughts?
How to stop it and create a city where anyone can live:
- build world class public transit
- double the number of houses but decommodify the housing market as much as possible with lots of social housing and controlled rent increases
I'm not too sanguine about the possibility of either of those things happening in the United States. Public transit has always kind of gone nowhere in this nation outside of the great coastal cities and Chicago. And as for the housing proposal, I can already hear the howls of "SOCIALISM!!!" that will be raised by certain very powerful interests and political parties.
I'd say if "building a city where anyone can live" is the highest goal, that's an issue in and of itself.
Would you want to work for a company "where anyone could work?"
What do you have in mind? The stanford elites get to live in san francisco, and the less-elite get shipped elsewhere?
>The price of a commodity good is typically determined as a function of its market as a whole: well-established physical commodities have actively traded spot and derivative markets. The wide availability of commodities typically leads to smaller profit margins and diminishes the importance of factors (such as brand name) other than price. [0]
If anything, housing is not enough of a commodity. Each site effectively has a bespoke regulatory framework that has to be discovered as expensively as possible, through a series of planning meetings. Each project requires an extremely high-touch political consensus process. Each building is expected to be unique-but-not-too-unique for its context, of-the-present-moment without altering historical character. As a practical matter, it's really expensive and take a long time and many iterations to arrive at a design that everyone agrees meets those criteria. Watch an SF Planning meeting video sometime. Most of the multifamily projects discussed on any given day are continuations. The curation process yields a great-looking museum, but we pay for the delay and uncertainty it creates in the price of admission.
Houses should be less like houses and more like soybeans: cheap, abundant, with many highly competitive producers and a price that floats just barely above the cost of production. Producers should be responding quickly and effectively to changes in demand, just as in the commodities markets. Commodities are the things we're most likely to have enough of for everyone!
Housing has effectively one producer, the San Francisco planning commission, and if it doesn't feel like meeting demand this year, everyone else has to just live with that. (There is no reason to think it would feel like meeting demand for social housing. Shadows, traffic impacts, neighborhood character changes, etc. are the same either way). Commodification would be an incredible improvement!
The question with many cities is the same - is it worth saving? A lot of any city's downfall is often the fault of its older residents. Why do the poor stay? Why do the rich not focus on changing it? Why do communities fail to fix it together?
The obvious answer seems to be moving to somewhere nearby that's cheaper and roomier. But people seem very resistant to this for some reason.
Postwar sprawl is grossly underpopulated which makes SF seem like Kowloon by comparison, but it’s still lower density than a standard European capital.
Because that requires money.
I am raising my kids here and disagree with your assessment. There is a pretty good community of families here.
[0] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/sanfranciscocit...
13% of 800,000 is about 100,000. Very few.
My point isn't about in comparison to other cities, it is more, does a smaller rate really mean "few" and how much of a problem is it really. It's not the problem that the most negative naysayers will claim. Note I didn't say something like "affordability poses no problems for families". Because it does. But there is indeed a vibrant community.
I don't think there are other major cities where the population is < 14% children. NYC is around 24%.
Your view of the "pretty good community" is irrelevant. Compared to other cities, San Francisco has "very few kids/families."
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/philmatier/article/San-F...
https://www.sfgate.com/mommyfiles/article/Many-families-leav...
We cannot stop other cities from doing this to us. So we are going to have to stop whining and cope.
I feel like people are forgetting how bad things use to be.
[Edited for tappos]
Yes, the Mission has gentrified and mid-market is a bit cleaner. But now there are widespread homeless camps, and open defecation and needles (formerly isolated to certain neighborhoods) are everywhere. And it’s not as if the Mission crime has gone away - it’s just further south now.
Property crime is up; even in SOMA, broken car windows were an occasional thing. Now it’s every day. Twin Peaks overlook is a robbery hotspot, and some guy was shot and killed for a camera up there not too long ago.
If you only ever visit the gentrified tech zones of SF, you’d be excused for thinking things have improved, but there’s no way to argue about it objectively.
Not to mention, the trash, used needles, and human feces now covering the city.
The first time I ever saw a ticker-tape parade after the Yankees won the world series in 2000, I assumed NYC would be covered in paper for months. Everything was completely covered in paper! By the next morning you couldn't tell anything happened. Not a single scrap of paper anywhere on the streets or sidewalks.
Same thing after the annual West Indian Parade. After the parade, the streets of Canarsie are absolutely taken over by people partying, dancing, drinking, the floats pass back through the neighborhood, and it's just complete chaos. Next day: like nothing happened.
They have garbage cans on every corner, and most are managed regularly enough. My wife is from Queens and she constantly complains about how hard it is to find a public garbage can in Chicago. I never realized it before, but she'd absolutely right.
Also their snow is handled far more efficiently - even if you don't have an alderman or police chief on your block.
NYC is definitely dirtier than Chicago, but it's pretty damned clean, considering how many people there are in such a small space.
Sad to hear it's declined so much.
(In the mean time, Amsterdam seems to have improved a lot.)
1. Companies don't take personal responsibility when they do antisocial things, claiming they can't be blamed, since they are just following incentives in order to compete.
2. Companies follow incentives, and lobby government to incentivize the behaviors that make them the most money (even if those behaviors are antisocial).
3. Government, influenced by the belief that the only way to do things is incentives (since regulation risks losing companies to other jurisdictions) gives companies the incentives they ask for (even when those incentives incentivize antisocial behavior).
4. GOTO 1.
We cannot trust markets to regulate the behaviors of companies. There is little to no benefit to any company, i.e. investing in ending homelessness when they can simply wall off their campus and prevent the homeless from entering. Companies might choose one or two social issues to do good on for marketing purposes, while creating equal or greater harm in other areas. Until SF (and indeed, the rest of the world) becomes more willing to regulate companies, things are only going to continue on their current trajectory.
One thing most people don't realize is that citizens own corporations. Retail investors (anyone with retirement accounts) own or are beneficial owners of the majority of public company common stock. And as shareowners, you have rights.
So, you can change this loop if as a shareowner, you change what happens between steps 1 and 2 by engaging with those companies.
I built this site to try and make that process accessible. For example, this NGO campaign for fund managers to require companies to disclose political spending: https://www.yourstake.org/campaign/disclose-corporate-politi...
I suspect any change in spending habits you might see from companies would fall under what I mentioned:
> "Companies might choose one or two social issues to do good on for marketing purposes, while creating equal or greater harm in other areas."
So in this case you'd see companies saying, "Look how transparent we are about our lobbying! Look how we're only lobbying for carbon emissions regulation!" Meanwhile they've bought up a massive campus and put spikes on the sidewalks to prevent the homeless from sleeping there, and pay 75% of their workers minimum wage.
And that's even if the disclosure of their political spending gives an accurate impression. It's quite easy to publicly spend to support an anti-carbon-emissions bill that will make a councilman's career, in order to buy that councilman's vote against the housing bill that would hurt your business. In the disclosure, it looks like your political spending was anti-carbon-emissions, when in reality it was anti-homeless.
It's not plausible for average citizens to become educated and do enough research to catch companies doing this in every case: there are too many companies and it's too complex. It's the job of politicians to do that research and regulate accordingly, and we need to empower them to do that, and elect politicians who will use that power effectively.
The only way out of this that I can see is to not allow companies to spend on politics at all--voters have the sole right to determine our politics, and that right needs to be protected from corporate spending.
I don't have enough context to say what's the best regulation to end homelessness in SF, as I have lived more in NYC area and am more familiar with NYC-specific problems than SF, but some ideas:
1. Require builders to build a certain percentage of low-income housing for every unit of high-income housing they build.
2. Require property owners to fill properties in a certain timeframe, rather than leaving properties empty waiting for a high-paying tenant, or simply keeping them as an investment.
3. Higher minimum wage so people at the bottom can afford housing.
4. Require a smaller pay gap between highest-paid and lowest-paid employees of a company (this addresses the corporate threat that if they are forced to pay higher minimum wages, they'll just raise their prices--the money for minimum salaries comes out of CEO's salaries instead of inflation).
0. Allow increase in supply, which fixes most other problems. Stop artificially constraining supply and allow more manhattanization.
Disconnecting them from any community they serve, work in or deal with.
Where I disagree with the MBAs who say this is the underlying belief, that companies can't be blamed for their actions. They can and should be blamed for their actions.
When an individual behaves amorally, we put them in jail. When a company behaves amorally, we say "companies are amoral, we can't do anything about it!" If companies really are amoral, then we should treat them as a threat just like we treat amoral people as threats.
I’m not sure how you could read TFA and come away with companies need more regulations? True or not it seems besides the point.
The soul of SF is empty as long as the laws and regulations of the city serve only the wealthy. The policies of the overwhelmingly democratic city have created a festering menagerie of wealthy post-IPO wunderkin and drugged homeless masses. The people that used to live in that city now drive 3 hours to get to their medial job in the city cleaning, catering, delivering, or transporting the rich urbanites.
More corporate regulation? I don’t get it.
SF has a minority of VCs caught in this loop. You're talking about the folks 40 (okay well it's a Tuesday at 7am, so 90) minutes south driving on 280.
To seamlessly conflate them is not my experience, and I have been working in SF for over 10 years in startups in various stages of creation or acquisition.
I spent almost two weeks recently in east Texas. I was shocked. It was a more diverse and egalitarian place by a good margin than San Francisco or Palo Alto. Everyone shopping at the same stores and eating at the same restaurants. Versus my memory of Palo Alto, where you’d only see whites and Asians in one place, and Hispanic people over in East Palo Alto (or in service jobs). It’s the difference between a functional, integrated society and a broken one.
Segregation was physically built into the planning of the city of Austin[0], and it's pretty apparent if you spend a significant amount of time here. Not only that, but rising cost of living in Austin keeps pushing minority communities further and further from the city.
The social scene is pretty similar to what you're describing in Palo Alto as well. Tech is overwhelmingly white and male, and the social scene around the industry reflects this.
I'm not going to argue that companies are the only problem, but job creation that only benefits highly skilled labor and leaves the rest of the community out to dry causes, or at the very least exacerbates, several of the problems outlined in this piece.
It's a system that has benefited me tremendously, but as I get out of the tech community "bubble" and explore more of Austin, I see a lot of parallels between SF and ATX. My fear is that SF is just ahead of the curve.
At any rate, if you tried to do business the way they do it elsewhere as a retailer or restaurant, you'd go under. There is just not the population numbers that would allow you to do that. This is not to say you don't have areas that make the San Fran model work. (Just visit Rice Village if you want a sort of "authentic white/asian elitist experience".) But most businesses are going to need to be open to serving everyone. Because like I said, it really did seem like most of the people, at least in Houston area, were either hispanic or black.
(I'll admit that my view of Houston was coming from the perspective of a small town Wisconsin farm boy type. So it's entirely possible that Houston is not majority minority. But it really did seem like it to me.)
EDIT:
Just looked it up. Harris county, and a lot of east texas is, indeed, majority minority. It's about 60% black and hispanic. It's about 31% white. So, yeah, it wasn't just my imagination or my upbringing.
Alternatively, SF (and the rest of the world) could stop accepting lobbying as an acceptable practice, and your loop breaks. ;)
Lobbying is the problem. Asking for more regulations when there are still opportunities for the big companies to get what they want through lobbying will never solve the problem.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_improvement_district
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_improvement_districts...
But only once did I actually see two street people start a knife fight on a subway train and it was during one of my probably less than five short visits to SF. It's equally rare that I'd agree with a National Review writer but SF was really ugly and quite unsafe feeling. Manhattan in the late 80s was probably a little more comparable to that. But I can't imagine why anyone would want to live in SF nowadays, if you're in tech you should aspire to work remotely and live anywhere you want.
If you went to a top school (top 25 - 50 in USNWR), then your social circle was much more "mobile" than average.
At this point I would be somewhat saddened to move away from a network I've been building for ~15 years.
What changed?
I'm living in Vienna, Austria which is a city consistently rated to be in the top 5 most livable cities by multiple independent evaluations.
How did that happen? A strong sense of ownership and infrastructure thinking over a _century_.
Just to mention the obvious, property prices do not exist in a vacuum and cities where property prices go through such a steep and continuous rise as in London, Moscow, San Francisco etc. are not a reflection of desirability or market forces but rather the total abdication of planning and responsibility from the local authorities.
There are dozens of things local leadership can do to fix infrastructure and living standards issues, never let anyone tell you otherwise.
By contrast the prior #1 most liveable city - Melbourne - has grown from 2 million 30 years ago to 5 million currently, forecast to get to 8 million by 2050, all due to mass immigration. Livability has fallen directly in line with population growth.
I've lived in a lot of cities around the world and think there is a 'sweet spot' population number: big enough to allow the provision of niche services and the agglomeration of talent, yet not too big as to introduce costly dis-economies of scale (usually through very expensive housing and transportation.) That level seems to be about 1-3 million.
The opposition to mass-immigration (the country is growing at about 1.6% annually, with the same annual level of immigration as the UK, a country with 3x the population) is completely justified and it is not in the long-term interests of the country or of individual Australians.
Its not only the formal mechanics - the whole system is rorted, with a lot of fraud. A Chinese businessman bribing federal politicians for citizenship is a current news item.
Finally Australia makes its way in the world by mining and selling off its fixed endowment of minerals. The rest of the economy is not particularly competitive, mostly just domestic services and real estate. More people means a smaller slice of natural resources per person. This is not theoretical - wages are flat and cost of living pressures are high in the country. Public healthcare, education and transportation are all overcrowded.
However, Vienna isn't without its faults. In Vienna you have a huge segregation between better and worse off people. You have a lot of low income people living in places like the 10th district and people in higher income brackets living in Doebling for example. This is counter productive in the long run as it will slowly create "ghettos" and mono cultures within the city. In London the wealth gap is much higher than in Vienna and yet people live more closely together. You can walk down a millionaires street one second and in the next moment be surrounded by council housing. In my opinion this is much better, as it prevents places from turning into ghettos and helps to keep the city in a sane state. There is a lot of gentrification happening in some parts of London too, but this is more of a side effect of the consistent growth rather than segregation.
The other problem which I see is that the average person in Vienna does not own any property. Most people are in rental properties for most of their lives and they mostly rely on a future state pension in order to retire. To me this is a fragile system, because it forces the country/makes it reliant on a highly taxed middle class. It is extremely difficult to prosper from middle class to being rich in Vienna - for the better or worse.
The entry barrier to creating a new company and the huge amount of regulation also makes it extremely unfriendly for startups and innovation.
Long story short, socialist cities in a capitalist Western country only thrive as long as the population is small enough and stable for a long period of time. It takes many years to build new schools, hospitals, GPs, train lines and bus routes, whereas it takes only a few weeks for an individual family to settle in a new place. If a city undergoes a massive growth in population then it doesn't even matter if everyone who moves into the city is a hard working high tax paying person, because the new money which they bring in will not be able to keep up with building the necessary infrastructure to comfortably accommodate everyone. It will take decades to catch up and only if there ever will be a slow down of growth, otherwise it will be a never ending chase.
From what I’ve seen it’s the most promising method to increase housing supply CA-wide given that many municipalities resist development.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/opinion/california-home-p...
> True revolution would involve curbing the authority of the San Francisco Planning Commission. If Democrats in the city or in Sacramento actually cared about the poor or the environment (density is green), they would enact a land-value tax and establish a redistributive policy to align the interests of the city, current residents, and future citizens. Strong government housing policy could spur growth and redistribute the city’s wealth fairly. But most of all, the freedom to build and experiment is the engine of Silicon Valley dynamism. Allow the experiments of the few to become the prosperity and fulfillment of the many, and the city could thrive once again.
They can't bring themselves to mention Proposition 13, somehow.
But damn, California ... time to put that wealth-transfer tax for the old, rich, landed elite to bed already.
Prop 13, despite benefitting landlords and commercial property owners more than homeowners, has an unfair reputation of keeping "grannies" in their homes in face of unfair taxation. Mention repeal of Prop 13 for commercial property, and even otherwise sensible people will start saying how heartless it is to ignore the plight of grannies, since this inappropriate connection is so strong in the collective psyche.
From what I can tell, Prop 13 seems generally popular[0], but could see an argument that it exacerbates the housing shortage in the Bay Area, so not sure which way you're pointing.
[0] https://www.ppic.org/wp-content/uploads/ppic-statewide-surve...
It does drive up housing costs. It also distorts commercial transactions weakens, local control, and generally casts a large shadow over, well, any conversation about taxation and anything taxation touches (like real estate) in California.
With that said, it's reasonable to expect them to propose reforms to prop 13 that preserve its core intent but cut back on the death spiral it encourages.
If Democrats in the city or in Sacramento actually cared about the poor or the environment
It's a completely useless way to preface any statement, signalling useless text to follow.
See what I mean?
Politicians dissemble, lie, act hypocritically, mislead voters, and... did I leave anything out? If you want to change their actual behavior, you have to change their incentives. One way to do that is to get the voters to hold their feet to the fire, to get them to act consistently with the values that the voters elected them to embody. (Which gets us back to "X is acting inconsistently..." being a perfectly valid thing to say.)
But the problem can run deeper than that. The voters themselves may mouth certain values, but actually desire things inconsistent with those values. At that point, the politicians are embodying the desires of the voters; the problem is the voters' hypocrisy. Once again, though, pointing out the hypocrisy is about the only way to try to attack the problem. (Changing the voters' incentives would almost always require the voters' acquiescence...)
[0] https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-sac-skelton-democrat...
Oh, just stop.
I have lived, full-time, in many, many cities in the United States and nobody - not the good Lutherans in Minneapolis nor the heirs-of-cowboys in Denver nor the tanned youth in San Diego nor anyone in NYC or DC - is stopping to attend to a filthy, passed-out drunk slumped over in the middle of a sidewalk.
The people (that I live and work with) in San Francisco are a lot of things but they're not monsters and I imagine they compare, roughly equivalently, to whatever golden locale Sam Altman grew up in.
“Crowded thoroughfares such as Market Street, even in the light of midday, stage a carnival of indecipherable outbursts and drug-induced thrashings about which the police seem to do nothing.”
This really touched me because the police in SF, if you ever see one, look disinterested at best.
I've also seen the police help, but it's few and far between because there are so few police on the streets in SOMA.
It's not that the police are bad, that they are the cause, or they are the only solution. I think the police are probably underfunded, understaffed, and under supported; the issue is more systemic then specific as the author states.
Edit: typo
Sure, SF has better weather than we do. But this year we had 6-7 ft of powder in mountains a 30-45 minute drive away. Homes with 5 bedrooms and a quarter acre are $350k. We have plentiful public parks, tons of museums, and great utility prices. Oh and my SF salary means I can fly/live elsewhere for the 2-3 hottest and coldest weeks of the year, whether or not I take that as PTO.
This SF company pays me more than local Utah companies would, but probably less than many of their SF-based employees. Win-win all around. They gave me a standing desk, 4k monitor, all the supplies. I get an office with a door and plenty of space for my plants. I don't even use headphones - I just have a receiver and some Onkyo speakers.
This is my second remote job and everywhere I look more and more companies are moving to a distributed working model. It just so much more financial sense than giving 1/3 of your own revenue to landlords, as well as the huge portion of employee salaries that go to landlords as well. Out here in Utah a company's budget can go to actually building the product. Pretty soon all the "San Francisco companies" will have to compete with others that can strongly undercut them on price due to not having "San Francisco overhead" but still have amazing talent.
My favorite thing about it: heads-down time. Folks interrupt me far less and I just get to hide away in my office and code for hours at a time. The only downside here is that I need to schedule time for explicitly socializing: I have 3 separate "lunch" groups that I attend at least once a week and I fly into SF quarterly and spend that week almost entirely socializing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
Automobile-based suburban sprawl is the only functional development pattern in the US because we’re so bad at building and maintaining public transit systems.
* A desirable place to live
* No growth
* Affordable
And for growth, you get to pick a mix of growing out, in and up. San Francisco proper obviously can't sprawl, so it needs to grow in and up. And the surrounding suburbs need to start doing their part too.
https://www.sftu.org/2018/06/five-myths-about-the-homeless-p...
According to that, 71% of people on the streets of SF used to be homed, and aren’t on the streets due to drugs.
"The vast majority of the people who are homeless today used to be housed – in San Francisco. According to the city’s 2015 homeless count, 71 percent of the people on the streets were living in San Francisco when they lost their housing. That means seven out of ten homeless people used to be your neighbors – before the tech boom and the eviction epidemic. "
So the presentation here is that average-joe-normal-churchgoer was minding his own business as a lifelong SF resident and was then evicted by an evil landlord, so his apartment could go to a techie, which sent him into a downward spiral to homelessness.
I have not done independent research into this myself, but I have a suspicion that the actual narrative is something like:
"borderline mentally healthy individual moves to San Francisco because it's interesting and fun and romantic (and warm) and, while still on their meds, manages to rent a room or an SRO or something, lives there for a month or two or six, runs out of either money or meds or familial support (or all three) and suffers their financial/emotional/mental breakdown here, on our streets, far from any support or family they have, if they had any at all."
If this suspicion is correct, it doesn't imply we shouldn't be compassionate or helpful or progressive in our responses, but it does suggest that we are importing problems and should consider how we might limit that tendency.
It also does not place some kind of moralistic "maybe they shouldn't be doing drugs in the first place" judgement on people - at the end of the day it is indeed a mental health issue. Just maybe it doesn't need to be our mental health problem.
(to be clear this is from 2015, so nearing 4 years out of date)
"Survey results show that 71% of respondents were living in San Francisco when they became homeless, and of those, 49% had been living in San Francisco for 10 years or more."
This sheds very little additional information. This statistic is often presented as if 71% of the homeless had their own apartment before they became homeless, but for all I know (and what I suspect) is that many of these people were "housed" in very tenuous, precarious situations that I might, personally, find indistinguishable from homelessness. We really need to know the specific definition of "housed" used in this survey.
That 49% of those 71% were physically present in SF for 10 years or more also tells us very little. I am led to believe that homelessness and the mental illness(es) that lead to it are cycles and that people fall in and out of ... the statistic, however, is presented as if individuals were happily housed in a plain old apartment for 10+ years before lightning struck and they were suddenly strung out on the street...
I guarantee if you spend a week working with the homeless in San Francisco, you'll meet at least some people more intelligent than you, people who at one point earned more money than you, people who are more mentally composed and happy than you. You won't meet all of them in the same person but you'll meet at least one example of someone who can disprove every single simplistic pet theory about homelessness ever proposed.
- I made no comments about homeless people being uninteresting or unintelligent or how much money they do, or did earn, etc.
- I have presented no pet theories about the causes of homelessness or the demerits of the homeless.
I have simply pointed out that a very, very commonly published and cited statistic is, in my opinion, very ill defined and probably misused. I also suggested a possible alternative narrative that I suspect is more correct.
Please don't put all of the things you hate into a box and then shove me in there with it.
"Seriously, get off the internet and go volunteer at St Anthony's for an hour."
I have done that all over the world.
Cheers!
According to that, 71% of people on the streets of SF used to be homed
The effects of trauma are lasting and real and I’d imagine there’s a healthy amount of trauma being created in homeless encampments.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/talking-about-trauma...
There seems to be lots of people as you say, but I'm sure if rent was cheap, that would help out a lot. I dunno if you've ever been to the SF Bay Area, but rent is REALLY high. The only reason I stayed as long as I did was I had rent control.
The problems listed by this guy are real: the nimbyism of property owners is insane, and the city bureaucracy (pretty much everywhere in the area -Berkeley was particularly lol) is completely bonkers. I'd also point out that civic groups that should help things, like various homeless advocates, generally seem to make things worse. At one point there was an actual $1000+/month subsidy which paid people to remain homeless. You'd lose it if you got housing! I'm pretty sure Newsom got rid of it (to much howling), but it really stuck with me.
> In the early seventies, the sport fishing Mecca of choice turned from the warm southern states where fish grew all year long, to oddly, some of the finger lakes in upstate New York. Record size fish were being taken almost daily. A sportsfisherman’s dream from lakes that unbeknownst to them had died ten yeas earlier from acid rain. With no new fish being born, the bottom of the food chain had already collapsed. With no small fish left for anglers to catch and release, eventually only the largest were left. Within a few years, the collapse was finally evident, and brutal for anyone who invested in a fishing lodge industry in the region.
Somehow everybody knows this, but votes in people who increase the power, scope, and responsibility of the local government which works against their interest?
They do need to watch out though: there is nothing about San Francisco (or any other area) that means the rich need to live there, or you need to move there to get rich. (unless you are into mining for wealth where you obviously need to be where your mineral is). If some other area becomes hot the people in San Francisco have the most to lose: your house that you paid so much for and work so hard to protect the value of has the farther to fall. When/if the bubble collapses those in more reasonable areas who voted for policies that keep property values reasonable (ie allowing more development and/or not driving people out) won't fall as far.
The thing is voting to preserve the feel of their neighborhood is in their personal interest too. They like the area they live in and simultaneously want to see some of the problems solved. The issue is these are in conflict because pretty much everyone else is also making the same decisions so everyone fights to protect 'their' piece of SF hoping they're not the ones who will have to change and move (because they can't afford to in a lot of cases) to densify SF.
Supporting affordable and dense housing development somewhere in the city is easy but then someone has to either agree to have it be them that sells their house and moves or get forced to by the city to have THEIR neighborhood change.
I also think there's also skepticism that allowing them actually meaningfully changes the renting situation because each individual project generally has mostly very expensive 'luxury' apartments. And the answer that 'well we'll basically have to cover all but the richest areas in these multistory dense apartment complexes to actually meaningfully impact the market' is understandably not satisfying to people who like the city they live in now.
I don't really think city planning boards can control how cities grow. A city is a living thing. If it "wants" to grow, let it grow. If it doesn't, I don't think it can be forced.
Detroit learned the opposite lesson and is recovering in part by realizing that the Detroit of today is destined to be a much smaller city population wise than it once was and they are adjusting and "right-sizing" the city accordingly. They are concentrating on the living areas and demolishing and transforming the dead ones into parks, public gardens, urban farming, or natural land. The result will be a smaller city with a ton of really cool history and a cool "post-industrial" vernacular.
Yes I used to live there. The subway system in Boston and NYC is very badly run, but the city as a whole at least for Boston isn't bad. They do a better job with urban planning at least.
"We don't want to become like NYC, where are all these people going to go??"
San Francisco could double its population and still be ~30% less dense than Paris is. Let's aim for that. Paris is generally considered to be an okay place.
Lol do you know anyone who lives there? It has one of the highest property prices and rents in the world.
Yes I do..
> It has one of the highest property prices and rents in the world.
It's still cheaper than San Francisco.
Do you mean just Manhattan? There are five boroughs.
But now that I think about it, it really is a matter of "when", not "if" the neighborhoods further from Manhattan get too expensive. I'll agree with you in like 5-10 years :[
And Flushing is already way the fuck out there.
I fantasize about winning Green card someday and moving to USA
So have I.
Why would anyone want San Francisco to become like that?
It would be a significant improvement. NYC is far from perfect, but it has semi-affordable rents (outside of Manhattan), semi-functional transit, and much less excrement.
This can't be anything other than corruption or incompetence. There is absolutely no way it can possibly cost that much. The new One World Trade Center (Freedom Tower) cost about $3.8 billion, so almost twice that, but that should give you a scale... and this was done in a city not known for cheap construction costs.
SF's development and planning culture is just epically bad.
Yeah, I'd hate for SF to be a world class city.
You are kidding right? The only city in US that even compares to world class cities (London, Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Sydney even Shanghai, Paris) is NYC.
SF is beautiful and amazing in its own right but world class is different. Start with public transportation to be world class.
It makes sense societally to spread out innovation centers in a number of areas to reduce catastrophic risk.
Did the author ever actually walk in SF? The homeless mostly stay in the flats, the hills are fine (and higher rent of course).
Posts and comments in threads like these cause me to not want to participate on internet communities as my experience in reality seems to not match up with the cavernous anxiety taking place online.
[1]http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/San-Francisc...
You get to choose 2 of the 3 constraints. Much of California's political situation is about people believing they can buck the constraints and have it all. You cannot, as long as there's free movement in this country. People come here for jobs, and the old residents demanding that the constraints all be met is causing things to go down the toilet. And people are getting angry at the failure of government to take a position against fantastical thinking and actually solve the problems.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SnapCrap-app-San-Fran...
Thank you!
> Cities are nearly immortal; though they decline, they rarely die.
Cities great and small die all the time. Ur died, Babylon died. SF will die. Cities die when their purpose no longer justifies their expense. And the purpose of most cities is concentrating people to facilitate trade. But increasingly there’s nothing to do in SF, especially for the masses. If people don’t figure out something for these people to do, SF will definitely die.
> ur died, Babylon died.
Your two examples are from 2-3 millennia ago. I would think if cities "die all the time," you would have more recent examples.
Maybe it proves the author correct that the first cities that came to mind are from 2500 years ago?
Because what I'm seeing on that list is ghost towns, nomadic civilizations, or a complete civilization collapse. What I don't see is a city the size of San Fransisco in a civilization as powerful as the United States of America completely collapsing and disappearing from the face of the planet like Ur or Babylon.
SF is antithetical to the kind of startup that YC used to be all about, for many reasons stated eloquently by TFA.
I hope SF can find a way to revitalize, sort of like NYC has done. It seemed to go through some dark times in the 70s, but now is much nicer. Wishing the same luck for SF.
It’s not a homelessness crisis. Homelessness is a symptom. Our cities are in the grips of a heroin & meth epidemic. Until we acknowledge that, it won’t get better.
One would think that, given this article comes to us from the National Review, this would be presented as a positive.
Jokes aside, the city and really the Bay as a whole are unlikely to change much. Prop 13 goes unmentioned in the article, somehow, though it remains a core part of the problem; so does the tendency for tech companies to build their headquarters on the peninsula or the west side of SJ. One would think that with the extraordinary amount of wealth floating around the bay that there would be some effort put into making the place better for everyone, ie. the old "changing the world for the better" idea that presumably drives a lot of startups, but I don't see it.
The standard for tech seems to be avoiding the hard problems of politics and long-term local issues that require campaigns and consensus rather than code and servers. I remember finding it striking a couple years ago to see that on the list of corporate sponsors for https://www.spur.org/, Microsoft was donating more money than Google. Perhaps there's another non-profit dedicated to urban planning in the bay that Google prefers to support, but I haven't heard of it. Apple could have considered building their HQ closer to public transport, but last I checked decided to go with tacking on a set of ugly massive parking structures to set the backdrop for their nice shiny new building.
I'm not really sure what should be done. The transient nature of many people that live in SF/the bay means they're unlikely to have an interest in city/area politics, much less take action on it (if they even can - several of my co-workers are on various kinds of visa). I'd guess that in the coming years tech will wax and wane but never really fade and the wealthy will gradually retreat from the public sphere and areas, surrounded by an ever-increasing array of private software functions that replace public services for those that can pay.
It suggests that San Francisco's housing problem is NOT directly at the feet of the folks who own the majority of the property, and instead implicates... uh, let me just check the article again... "Baby Boomer civil servants [acting] as urban taxidermists stuffing and mounting a dead city so it always resembles the past."
The implication of that paragraph is that it's democratic "regulation" that is halting SF's expansion, but if you live in the city you're looking at the recent unsuccessful public/private partnership building projects wondering why building codes aren't stricter (I'm looking at you, ridiculous Salesforce(tm) transbay terminal). The implication that it's bureaucracy and not a bitter generational argument between young and old residents about "preserving the city" vs. "meeting the housing demand" is likewise absurd; it's SF citizens as a whole that are debating how to proceed. A republican governance wouldn't be better off here, except it might find more alignment with property owners (who benefit enormously from this state of affairs) instead of less.
It suggests that SF doesn't have culture, but that's wrong. It has tons of culture, but it's not accessible to rich white people hoping to stroll through like tourists. You can still access it if you code yourself correctly, but if you roll up with merino wool shoes and $800 vest over a tech t-shirt and iWatch, you're not gonna make a lot of progress because people will avoid you.
But if you are that person, it's not like there aren't a dozen hopeful artists lurking around the edges of popular rich mission spots hoping to get your spare $20s. It's not like public spaces don't exist for you.
Most humorously, it features at least one nationally reviled industrialist who has increasingly had a hard time finding anyone willing to work with him anywhere where Software Engineers make good money. Thiel avoids popping up in SF because people don't like his politics here and would rather he retreat back to his bubble in orange county. We don't, strictly speaking, need his money. We have enough money, we need to build up the will to use it to solve the problems we have more acutely, but that are shared in kind with every city that's finding a way to prosper in an era where many other cities are struggling to recover from even more acute decline.
This article is everything I'd expect from a National Review piece about SF. It is confused about the geography, tone deaf to the politics, quick to blame local government for problems brought about by citizens, and steeped in the popular meme that "art is dead because I don't see marble busts anymore" memes that sound like they're fresh out of a PragerU video.
What? National Review doesn't do news, it does opinions. And it's pretty upfront about being conservative.
National Review was founded in 1955 by William F. Buckley Jr. as a magazine of conservative opinion.