Comment by mprovost | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mprovost | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

While wandering around Vienna a few years ago looking at all the buildings from the height of the empire and realising that it's quite a liveable city, for some reason it made me think about San Francisco. If the tech industry disappeared from the city tomorrow, what would be left in 100 years to show that it was there? It doesn't seem like there have been any meaningful improvements made to the actual city or its infrastructure. Just go on BART and listen to the 1970s robot voice announcements that could easily be done much better by an iPhone and Siri now. Certainly it's easier for tech companies to build parallel private transport networks than it is to invest in better public transportation for everyone.

It doesn't feel like SF has been able to capture any of the wealth being generated in a way that other cities like Vienna have, and now even when it's a century past its peak, people there still benefit. Certainly the homeless in SF don't seem to benefit even now, but maybe there are so many because SF truly is the best place to be homeless.

The reason why Vienna is so liveable is because it's the heartland of the Social Democrats. They governed the city from 1919-1934 and ever since 1945. As much as I don't like the current Social Democratic Party, their predecessors transformed Vienna into what it is today. A good place to live for everyone.

In fact at it's imperial height, Vienna had a higher population than today(2.1M then 1.9M now), living in significantly less space. The living conditions of the poorer part of the city were pretty grim. This is what got the Social Democrats to gain power in the first place.

This history also means there's a lot of pre-1914 city per capita today. The urban planning of that era has tended to result in more liveable neighborhoods today, compared to districts & cities built from scratch more recently.

The wealthy class of the past had spend some of the wealth to be remembered via public works or patronage of art.

Through their vanity or just a goodwill they wanted to be remembered for something.

This doesn't seems to be a rule, but an exception.

All of the social contracts of old societies were broken old time ago. Helping poor is either PR stunt or dirty work of middle class. Or a ploy to extract more wealth (lookup disaster capitalism).

Globalization decoupled the 'haves' from the place they are living. They can uproot and travel away to another community. Be it SF or next SF.

This was much harder in the past. Business and family ties would make it harder to just move to Spain.

That tied the 'haves' to 'have-nots' in a way. So the 'haves' might be incentivized to make the place a better for everyone - this would be that saying that the philantrophism is just selfish behavior as you make your own environment a better place, only through indirect means.

But this is largely no more.

That's a great point. In the past maybe people wanted to improve the city because that's where they lived, and saw themselves living. There was a comment on HN years ago that I still remember where they compared working in the Bay Area to working in the mines - when people would come over to the New World for a few years to make their fortune, and then go home rich. If you view yourself as a temporary resident, then you're probably not that interested in becoming part of the community and improving the place where you live. Why would you if you're going to take your FAANG money and move to cabin in the woods in a few years?

> move to cabin in the woods Or gated community, completely isolated from real world.

I wouldn't be surprised if this would start happening next decade or so, were large chunks of land will be used as pseudo autonomous zones where rich wall themselves off.

Your comment stirred an "ancient history of the future" type feeling for me. If the BART recordings could already be 50 years old (I doubt they are, but let's go with that for a minute), imagine that there's some speech recognition library being installed in some present day infrastructure project. Now imagine that module could sit unchanged, perhaps occasionally refurbished by historical technology preservation societies for hundreds of years until future generations look back on it like we might look back on city fortifications, aqueducts, cast iron bridges or Austrian Empire architecture.

This comparison holds true for most major European nations vs the US.

That may be true but at least to me it was more obvious in Vienna because it's someplace that was clearly once a lot more important than it is now. Cities like London or Paris are still growing and changing. In Vienna I had the sense that this was someplace that was once the centre of an empire, and whose heyday has clearly passed (for now, who knows?) but has still retained a lot of what made it such a great city during the time period described in the article.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com