Comment by julianeon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by julianeon | Hacker News Reader

To me it seems that SF is still fairly safe. In my opinion a lot of people don't understand who SF is 'for' these days.

It's not for poor people (no doubt) and it's not really for billionaires either, for people so untethered from jobs and material needs that place is irrelevant.

If you can pick up and pay cash for a Tahoe house tomorrow, sure, you might leave. But that resident was never very plentiful. They might make for an interesting anecdote, but in the big picture, they don't matter.

SF's core value, today, is for this person:

You work for Google, or Apple, for FaceBook, or an accomplished startup. You are a senior engineer or an executive. You may have gone to an Ivy League. You want to live in a fun, world-class, brand-name city - but not Palo Alto or San Jose. Where can you go?

San Francisco is pretty much alone in its category here, as the type of city that type of person likes. There's no good substitute in the area; "a really clean Starbucks and a top-notch Target" ain't it, and will never be it.

While there may be fluctuations in house sales and so forth, I think SF will continue to rank highly with that demographic. And as long as that's true, housing prices will be safe.

> You work for Google, or Apple, for FaceBook, or an accomplished startup.

The irony is that none of those companies have a real presence in the city. Their campuses are miles away. So you live in the city and ride on a tour coach down to your megaplex every day.

I don’t know why anyone strives to live a life like this.

181 Fremont is Instagram HQ and there's an adjacent tower with a huge Facebook SF office. I'd call that a real presence.

Google and Facebook have offices in SF proper, and YouTube is located just south in San Bruno. "none ... have a real presence" is a considerable overstatement.

Though yes, a large number of employees do travel south from SF daily.

The larger issue is that the Peninsula and South Bay have resisted housing densification and transport improvements for decades.

It's really not an overstatement. They have some sales offices and some execs like having offices the city so they don't have to commute --but the great majority work in the the main campuses on the penn.

That's less than 8%. 8% is tech. 75% of Sf is on rent control.

SF's core value sounds like a real cancer. I wonder if SF's homeless problem and the reality of service workers working for pittances barely able to afford living there are a form of a reality check on the elites who live there. As if to show them the reality of the world outside of their palace.

If SF can figure out to automate away all of their poor service workers and then crack down on the homeless, then it would be truly a paradise for them eh?

Well, there's a much easier alternative, which may be in reach now: rich people and tech workers become fed up with SF and leave in droves. Rents plunge and houses become much more affordable, and service workers can live there again.

This would require a level of fed-up-with-SF that I don't see in practice - like every other tech worker deciding to leave, and people in other industries too. But if that happened, yes: SF would become affordable and people with lower incomes could purchase houses there, and honestly that might not be such a bad outcome.

The city was once like this, after all - a place where people with low incomes, along with oddballs and misfits, could put down roots (buy houses) and live.

if all tech workers leave, won't this impact the businesses that employ the service workers? At that point, what's the point of affordable housing if the service workers don't have jobs?

That's not realistic.

I've talked with residents who lived in SF back when it was a lower income city. Here's what they had to say.

Example: there used to be a time when you could find sporting good stores, tire repair shops, thrift shops, toy stores, and generally not-very-much-money making businesses in SF.

Those are all gone now - priced out.

If tech workers left, it's not like their office space would stay vacant. It would get repurposed. Those kinds of businesses would move back in.

They'd need service workers, so they'd get hired back.

And house prices, rent prices would drop.

If you think that's unrealistic, I would say: that's far more realistic than hoping for something that demonstrably is not going to happen - say, 500k new housing or apt units being built. That's not gonna happen.

If you want more affordable housing at any cost, no matter what, this is one actually realistic way to get there.

> If tech workers left, it's not like their office space would stay vacant. It would get repurposed.

I'm just not sure it would, at least not until the long term. It's pretty challenging to make a retail store work on upper floors of an office building.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com