How San Francisco Broke America’s Heart | Hacker News Reader

How San Francisco Broke America’s Heart

washingtonpost.com

People complain that prices are so high that none of the restaurant staff, waiters, etc can live in the city. NY is also as costly as SF. You see foodcarts which earn lesser than SF restaurants, right in the Financial District. How does NY manage this? People live somewhere away and commute. It's going to get difficult for workers, but we're definitely not in any kind of crisis here. NY has been managing it since ages. Several other cities are. SF too can.

> [service workers] live somewhere away and commute.

How is that acceptable morally? Americans believe they have a meritocracy and look down their noses at societies like India with caste systems, but in reality America has a caste system too, even if somewhat better.

> How is that acceptable morally?

How is commuting morally acceptable?

> Americans believe they have a meritocracy

That’s an unwarranted generality. In my experience, the likelihood of an American claiming to believe that is positively correlated with socioeconomic status: those with higher status are more likely to believe status reflects merit.

Agree somewhat. Just like many Muslim women have bought into the misogyny inherent in having to wear a burqa, many people on the bottom in America have bought into the meritocracy and American Dream myths.

> Just like many Muslim women have bought into the misogyny inherent in having to wear a burqa

I'm disinclined to view one set of sex-specific cultural standards of modesty as inherently sexist unless one views all of them that way.

For the most part I do. Americans disparage Muslim practices like this as backward, yet women here get arrested for breastfeeding in public. American puritanical attitudes differ from Muslim attitudes by degree, not kind. I’m generalizing of course. I’m talking about cultures, not every individual.

Your arguments might be more compelling if you'd stick to one domain within a discussion, or at the very least, non-distractingly coherent ones. Your first comment was germane. This less so.

I was replying to

> those with higher status are more likely to believe status reflects merit.

It correlates much less than one would think, much as being anti-burqa doesn’t correlate with gender within a Muslim population as much as we’d think.

Fair enough, though that wasn't clearly communicated.

Having to commute because the real estate market prices you out is the same as a caste system?

Yes, because one class of people, determined predominantly by birth (race, gender, genetic advantages at skills in short supply), get to choose where they live, and are served by another class of people who have to live far away and spend their already discounted time commuting, who can’t afford the very thing they work to provide the upper castes.

Not caste advantages but earned? That’s like saying a 7 foot tall athletically gifted person earned the wealth those innate attributes gave him in an NBA career.

There’s certainly a perspective where everyone’s equal and nobody deserves anything. The 7 foot basketball player would play worse if he wasn’t born tall; the Stanford valedictorian would score less if she wasn’t born smart.

That doesn’t seem like a productive way to look at this kind of inequality issue. If some places to live are better than others, not everyone can have the best.

But isn't the caste system marked by lack of mobility, in terms of the ability to transcend your caste?

That’s why I said “somewhat better“. But ask 100 black persons how much mobility they have, and see how many say “I have completed mobility, race doesn’t matter. White supremacy is a myth.” Or the brown people who wash your restaurant dishes, mow yours SV lawns and clean your SV office toilets. Sure, many are immigrants who come here because they have more opportunities than where they came from, but that’s moving up a rung in the caste system, not escaping it. Even the liberal essays I read advocating more immigration or amnesty say things like “Who else will pick our fruit?”. I cringe and am ashamed for us every time I read something like that.

Even in India in theory you have mobility, as the country has tried to address it the same way America has tied to correct a history of racism: caste-based discrimination is illegal, and there is affirmative action / quotas to correct imbalances. But just as here, where 150 years after the Civil War and 50 years after MLK we have a racially stratified society, so the problem persists in India.

There was a time that neighbourhoods were far more socioeconomically integrated, though the poor tended to live either above or below (basement apartments) the wealthy.

(Hight gained status with the introduction of lifts.)

Though on balance those times were far less class-blind, or soceoeconomically mobile, thanmuch of the20h-21st centuries.

Win some, lose some.

> How is that acceptable morally?

Because Economics

Once, when Boris Yeltsin was asked why he cannot make it so that everyone has everything, he replied very wisely: "there is not enough 'everything' for everyone"

NY has a robust public transportation system. SF does not. Commuting via car, parking, etc creates a floor on who can participate in SF’s economy.

I live in New York now and completely agree. That’s not to say my criticisms of the Bay don’t also apply to NYC.

> NY is also as costly as SF

Actually, it’s cheaper. Our NIMBYs aren’t so supercharged so as to have convinced most renters that construction is bad for them.

"This is unregulated capitalism, unbridled capitalism, capitalism run amok."

Um, what? California, and specifically San Francisco, has some of the most regulated and restricted development on the planet. This is not unregulated capitalism.

Seriously. It is hard to imagine a much less capitalistic housing market than SF without every building being owned by a government entity.

Who can live on $15 an hour in this city transformed by innovation?

It's a city transformed by bad zoning policy, not "innovation:" https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing

In Singapore, a poster child of modern capitalism, the vast majority of residents live in government-built apartment buildings. In many cases the tenants own their apartment and can resell at market rate after a certain period, but the land (if not the apartment itself) is generally on a 50-year or 99-year lease from the government.

Government regulation isn't binary. Conservatives and liberals in America are blinded by their own prejudices, most of which are shared prejudices :(

Singapore is the poster child for benevolent/effective authoritarianism.

This is being downvoted, without replies. Could someone chime in on why?

Because there are substantial numbers of people on HN who downvote comments because they express opinions with which they disagree, or to which they are ideologically opposed, rather than because the comment isn't a constructive contribution to the discussion.

So says Benioff (the above quote), the man with the largest building downtown. The man who wants to use the City Gov to tax other business out of SF (see Stripe, Prop C).

Yea, he wants government to further entrench his position (like Wall Street, etc). Not surprised. What we need is more capitalism, less government intrusion into things like taxation, zoning.

Look, there's a place for capitalism. There's a place for socialism.

But there's also a time to look in the mirror and realize the policies that are 'destroying the city', if you believe that narrative, are from people like Benioff (the neoleft). For decades.

And the nerve to think doubling down on these failed policies, along with more taxation to fund it, is the way out? Like paying people's rent for life via subsidized housing? Give me a break.

Make it legal to build in the city. There was some stat iirc which said it's illegal to build on 80% of the city. Change that. It's a failed government policy that makes it hard or impossible for non-tech workers to work here.

But as an aside, the patronizing tone of this article disgusts me. I'm tired of it. They paint this black and white picture which stifles community. It divides. And it's usually someone who doesn't live here. But some drive by New Yorker (writer lives in Philadelphia) looking to hate. Has Karen Heller ever been to Lucca before it closed? Or Borderlands coffee? Doubtful. Look, Lucca was on its way out. The owner was super old and personally the product were subpar. And as someone pointed out in the Wapo comments, Michael Feno, the owner of Lucca owned the building. So the writer's being facetious as well. I'm actually a bit bummed out by Borderlands, but they could've been more.

> Yea, he wants government to further entrench his position (like Wall Street, etc). Not surprised.

Yes...that's also not capitalism. That's cronyism.

Exactly. I've heard it referred to as 'socialism for the rich'. Or really imo my reading of practical communism. Basically if you 'know a guy in the party' you're good. But it has the veneer of sounding good. This is my take on Benioff and people like him.

And yet the Bay Area has the worst-rated road maintenance of any American metropolitan area. I still can’t understand how that happens in a region with the most billionaires per capita on Earth.

Probably because a large percentage of those billionaires have their wealth in the form of company equity which is untaxed or taxed at the low capital gains rate.

Year round fair weather means that roads last longer without maintenance and perform better. If there were frost heaves and common storms to worry about then road maintenance would be a bigger issue, but as it is the condition of the roads matters less and so it gets less attention. The statistics are also skewed by extreme outliers like Oakland which have an unusually large number of unusually broad streets which naturally leads to an unusually large maintenance problem. Any rational person could see that, but road maintenance is not something most Americans relate to rationally.

That the most upvoted comment right now, in reply to an article about socioeconomic injustice, in a forum read by people who benefit from the status quo, is complaining about the roads not being good enough is rather telling.

While I get and agree with your point, coming from the bottom of the socioeconomic spectrum you reference I must say, our roads in the Bay Area are seriously broken. Dangerous for motorcyclists and drivers the same.

I had moved away for a couple years and when I came back they were a mess.

Yes, we could put more money other places, but the roads would be a decent place to put some money to have a lasting impact.

Better public transit with expanded routes would be pretty nice too. It still blows me away that some higher city public officials make a quarter million or more.

They're suppose to be public servants yet they forget what it's like to live on the lower rungs.

Living in the Rust Belt, I play the world's tiniest violin for people who say it's too expensive in San Francisco, yet are themselves transplants who chose to live there.

If you're disgusted with the rampant inflation of SF, come to Iowa, or Michigan, or Indiana, or Ohio. You can live like a king on wages that barely keep you in the middle class on the West Coast.

Bring us the economic value of your startups and the well-educated workers they draw. Give smart, ambitious local kids a reason to stay instead of moving away forever to some coastal city. Spreading the opportunity and wealth of the tech economy outside a handful of the biggest cities will do a lot to calm the political anger that's led to Donald Trump.

It's not just transplants who are being priced out of San Francisco, proper, or the Bay Area generally.

And for several classes of employment, the area has weight vastly exceeding virtually all alternatives.

A modicum of empathy is warranted.

I'm from the Midwest and feel the same way. SF and the like are for people looking to ladder climb. If people just want to survive, it's almost too easy in the Midwest. Struggling in Cali is a choice.

Pack a U-Haul and go.

My heart is broken.

I grew up an hour to the southeast of the Bay, and went to high school school in Atherton and college at Berkeley (both in the 80s, long before many HN readers were born). I used to be so proud that my home was the most progressive place in the country. Now I am embarrassed. My old home is now emblematic of much that is wrong with our culture.

What the Bay says (We're so liberal! We're anti-Trump!) so deeply contradicts what it does.

Perhaps this is naive, but also as someone who grew up in the bay (south bay specifically) it feels like after the crash of 2001, and the resurgence of tech after that, the culture took on a markedly different tone. I guess perhaps in the transition from silicon dominance to web dominance something felt like it was lost in the valley.

I think it's more that prior to 2001, investors gave web companies a free hand to figure out how to make money. We saw how that went -- both in the giddy highs and crash.

Afterwards, the MBAs came in and decided that ads and saas were the ways to make money, and if you diverged they needed to understand it. Which makes sense, and I think it's why we haven't had exactly a 2001 repeat. But it's making tech work far less of a giddy job.

Bay Area politics are much more nuanced than that.

For example, there's always been a strong Libertarian community in the larger Tech community. And over the last couple years a lot of online Libertarian communities have shifted to more right (and far-right) ideology.

There's also a strong Leftist community in the Bay Area, arguably much stronger than the rest of the country. This shouldn't be forgotten. You're way more likely to meet a Communist at a bar in SF than most parts of this country.

There's a strong "liberal" community in the Bay Area, these people will support liberal social issues (Gay/Trans inclusion, virulently anti-Trump, supporting of Muslims and other oppressed communities, reigning in the banks, etc.). But, a lot of these people also suffer from the Not-In-My-Backyard syndrome and will balk at modest reforms to Schooling or Housing Policy.

There's also Reagan Republicans, Antifacists, Anarchists, and people who aren't checked into Politics at all.

I'm not saying everyone in the Bay Area fits into one of these groups or even that my characterizations of these groups are accurate. These groups aren't monoliths.

I would just encourage you to not let your heart get broken, things can get better. The Bay Area is still very Progressive. Volunteer for a Progressive Campaign, DSA, or some other progressive organization and I think you'll get your hope back!

> There's also a strong Leftist community in the Bay Area, arguably much stronger than the rest of the country. This shouldn't be forgotten. You're way more likely to meet a Communist at a bar in SF than most parts of this country.

I went to Berkeley in the 80s. I’ve been back and it’s no where near as counter culture. It’s often the difference between hippie and hipster.

The reality is that if you live your convictions, it starts to become impossible to afford to live in the Bay Area, much like it becomes more and more impossible to remain honest and keep winning elections to higher and higher office. Such people either sell out or move out.

At the same time, the Bay Area's concentration of tech labor has fostered a new left-leaning political force, one that is still in the process of decoupling from the bosses and party politics and realizing a unique voice.

I do think that things are different now, and there's very substantial generation gap in the political scene that has made it hard to create movement, but the threads that connect the old to the new are there and are rapidly getting stronger as tech has gotten more consolidated under a few roofs.

I’m glad that more people are getting a bit more woke, but sadly humanity has the bad habit of sleeping through the screeches of the smoke alarm, waking up only after the house is burning.

The people in the penthouse can go a long time before the fire ever reaches them; and they’ll probably get airlifted out anyway.

I don't understand why it's always new residents who get blamed for high rents / legacy businesses getting priced out and not property owners (many of whom are "lifelong" residents) who set the rents.

I largely agree with the article. San Francisco used to be one of my favorite places. Now, I try to avoid it when at all possible.

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