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Comment by pbourke | Hacker News Reader

> The result is San Francisco, the most innovative city in a generation, proposing a Office of Emerging Technology to require any technology that uses public space, scooters for example, to get prior permission from the city

That sounds totally reasonable, lest your city become clogged with broken-ass scooters after the n-th scooter startup goes on their "incredible journey" to the stars.

Perhaps if you're going to litter the streets with scooters you should be required to post up cash in escrow for unlittering said scooters if/when you disappear.

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no offense but from someone coming from a place where oublic transportation was lobbied into non existance, that board sounds exactly like the kind of thing that becomes an umbrella and fucks up every kind of innovation. Are the scooters even a problem?

Scooters dropped at random places are a massive problem for blind people and people with mobility disabilities.

The bike hire stations you see in some big cities (e.g. London) are a better solution; you get charged for it until you put it back in the rack. Dumping the bike somewhere just means your credit card will keep charging. It should be the same for the scooters. Mind you, this requires the city to work together with the scooter company, which implies that the city will be pulling one company forwards which may be considered unfair competition in the US.

The city could also pick up any scooters that are in the way / abandoned and fine the owner company for each of them, which would be a big incentive for the company to deal with it themselves.

Scooters need to be charged every night so juicers collect randomly abandoned scooters before the complete battery failure that would prevent company running the service to track its fleet. So charging for time up to infinity may solve the cost problem on the operator side, doesn't solve the societal problem of scooters left in random places. Where I live scooter users are charged extra if they don't deliver the scooter to a predefined location but that's not enough of a deterrent.

> Mind you, this requires the city to work together with the scooter company

And some cities would be happy to. Problem is, scooter companies don't want to work together with cities! They just show up and open shop, Uber style...

> The city could also pick up any scooters that are in the way / abandoned and fine the owner company for each of them

...and then cry foul when that happens, because why, this is destroying innovation and assaulting honest businessmen.

I don't actually understand your statement here - are scooter's public transportation? I thought they were owned by private companies. How is this board going to fuck up every kind of innovation in relation to public transportation.

> Are the scooters even a problem?

Yes.

They're littering the streets. Beyond being just annoying, it creates a life-threatening hazard for the blind people. On top of that, they're used - as intended to be used - on the sidewalks, instead of the streets where they belong. This already killed many people around the world.

One idiot on a Bird copycat almost killed my then-9-months-pregnant wife, as he carelessly rode the sidewalk at high speed and didn't see passengers exiting the bus.

Cities have various policies towards innovation; some entangle everyone in red tape, others wave new ideas through. But the common thread of the famous SV startups in city space, and their copycats around the world, is building a business that dumps a lot of externalities on society, treating city councils as enemies, and then being surprised when said councils don't cooperate. If they want more friendly regulators, then perhaps they should be respectful towards said regulators (and people they represent).

You have it backwards. The scooters are not, and have never been, a problem. The real problem is feces and needles. The real truth here is the SF gov is greedy, and rabidly anti-tech. I cannot wait until this whole place is gentrified and cleaned up.

Have you lived in SF? Because this comment reads like an outsider looking in.

Perspective from 25 years in the mission: the scooters were the problem.

I heard they could present a challenge for the blind

> until this whole place is gentrified and cleaned up

Because the rents are still too affordable.

Affordability has nothing to do with gentrification. SF has backwards zoning laws, with insane NIMBY culture.

> I cannot wait until this whole place is gentrified and cleaned up.

This is a colonial mindset and regards the eviction, impoverishment, and exile of other human beings as nothing compared to one's own desires. Yes they'll be replaced. That's what colonization is.

This is also the mindset that no one is owed a neighborhood - if you want to live in it, buy. If you are renting, too bad. You cannot both have the short term flexibility of rent and the desired staying power of buying.

Could you develop your train of thought to illustrate how this comment is coherent with another you've made elsewhere:

> Affordability has nothing to do with gentrification.

Yes. I appreciate you asking.

Today's gentrification is caused by wealthier people moving into neighborhoods, and making them less affordable. BUT this affordability reduction is relative to the price we were at before.

The price we were at before is already extremely unaffordable due to insane building restrictions and a NIMBY attitude baked into regulation.

If the city allowed the building of high-rises everywhere, would gentrification stop? No. Certain neighborhoods would get gentrified, and become relatively higher priced. Overall, however, city affordability would skyrocket.

I believe I understand your opinion. In my very personal opinion you're ignoring a couple of variables:

It's probably not even possible to expand housing capacity to a significant degree in most locations it'd matters,

Even if it were, I contend the overall cost of living would go up dramatically (even in the hypothetical new high rises) due to transportation saturation and supply chain drama,

Also unless you literally double capacity everywhere what incentive do landlords (even new ones) have to moderate aggregate and individual rent growth? Since the state of the area is f'd today and demand is high, if there are any improvements demand can only go (dramatically) up.

Incentives can be changed. The economy is all just conventions and pretty arbitrary rules.

I disagree, insofar as the term "economy" interfaces with human nature and imperatives, such as the means to secure shelter and nurishment.

Like it does currently?

> It's probably not even possible to expand housing capacity to a significant degree in most locations it'd matters,

This sounds like an excuse. The city of Tokyo alone builds more housing every year than the entire state of California: https://www.thenational.ae/business/property/want-affordable...

Tokyo is an in-demand city in an earthquake prone area, and they've managed to create enough housing to stay ahead of demand.

This is only tangentially relevant. Japan has a culture where it's accepted that residential property is relatively medium term, and should be upgraded or rebuilt semi-regularily. Contrast that to real estate as an investment/heritance vehicule in the west.

Also, personnaly I wouldn't be ready to live in a Tokyo flat and I suspect most of the target population isn't either. That we may not have a choice down the line is likely, but another issue.

I think I'd live in a Tokyo flat if it cost $1200/month for a one-bedroom spot in the centre! [0] (with outstanding public transit, too)

For that price, you can get a bunk-bed in San Francisco [1]

[0] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/Tokyo

[1] https://sf.curbed.com/2019/7/18/20699340/podshare-san-franci...

> I cannot wait until this whole place is gentrified and cleaned up

The thing you are complaining about Are The Consequences of gentrification. They are the output of the process. The system you advocate for produces that which you are complaining about.

It's not going to be "cleaned up". This is what that process yields. Gentrification creates more "cracks to fall through" and so more people "fall through the cracks" through the financial consequences. These issues are the consequence of it - that's why it happens everywhere things are gentrifying.

These stratifications produce slums, favelas, cantegrils, gecekondus, barrios, karton siti, paraggoupoli, zopadpatti, baraccopoli, putri, perkampungan kumuh... there's words in almost every language for this phenomena. Policies are machines. They produce things.

This is the outcome of the process, globally, for centuries. You can not possibly get to your goal through that method. It does not work.

I know how alluring the logic is, but like counterintuitive math and science, the obvious solution does not work and we need to stop pretending otherwise. Reality doesn't give a damn about personal belief and stubbornness in systems that don't work. You can't will a wrong answer into being right.

It's the material reality.

No. It is the consequences of almost every major city in the US buying one way bus tickets for its vagrants to SF, compounded with a city wide refusal to police low level street crime.

That's what caused say, the rookery at st. giles in the 1850s? fascinating ... please go on...

I’m confused by this stance because, here in Australia gentrification seems to result in less crime and fewer homeless people out on the streets. There are no slums here in Melbourne. Or in New Zealand. Or really, any developed nation outside the US. If gentrification means the rich get richer while the poor stay poor, of course gentrification won’t help poor people. But just because that’s how it happens in the US doesn’t mean gentrification itself is to blame.

The problem, as you say, is the cracks that people can fall through. Nobody should be sleeping rough and hungry in the richest country on earth. Solve that with a social safety net, not by banning new construction.

Yes, now that's a matter of terminology. A holistic focus on improving the lives of everyone in the community, not by raising prices but by improving the material living conditions and reducing the stress and anxiety of economic reproduction and reducing or eliminating the precariat, that's generally not gentrification. The way Australians use "livable city" really doesn't exist in American discourse.

A market and property based approach that locks people out, allocates resources according to ability to pay or some other social status, and sees signs of inability to pay, poverty, and hardship including death, as merely personal moral failings, and the market consequences as some amoral natural system, that's gentrification. Maybe some think that's "the right way to do it" but it's also a really efficient slum creation engine.

We're set for 1/4th the world to be squatters by 2030, that's not sensationalistic, it's the reasonable expectation.

Historically this phenomena is found in immigrant or religious minority communities because they are thought to be less deserving. It's reinforcing because then they can be pointed at, in squalor, and say "see, I told you they were filthy". Racist policies lead to outcomes that differ on racial lines, duh...it was set up that way.

It's all foolish illogical nonsense that should have been tossed in the garbage in the 1700s with the other discarded superstitious rubbish. We can do better.

> Yes, now that's a matter of terminology.

> A market and property based approach that locks people out, allocates resources according to ability to pay or some other social status, and sees signs of inability to pay, poverty, and hardship including death, as merely personal moral failings, and the market consequences as some amoral natural system, that's gentrification.

Yeah this is a disagreement about terminology. It sounds like you've just described a grab-bag of local social & political systems you don't like and you're attaching the word 'gentrification' to it all. We use the word 'gentrification' to describe things which happens in other places too, to mean different things, often in a non-perjorative way. Reusing that word to mean something similar but different is pretty confusing.

What he describes is the very standard outcome of urban gentrification in American cities. It may be localized to the United States but he is not doing anything nefarious with his description.

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