Tech’s flight from San Francisco is a relief to some advocates | Hacker News Reader

Tech’s flight from San Francisco is a relief to some advocates

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105 pointsharambae311 comments

Act two of the tech's flight will not be so pretty for SF. I don't think the advocates will be thrilled with the results.

Given SF has been extremely heavy handed with the lockdowns, and a huge number of people leaving, alot of them well paid. Restaurants and businesses are closing(and moving out of the area) at a rapid pace. Expect a historic drop in revenue for the city, this means less services, less funding for education, more filth, more homeless, more drugs everywhere.

The residents who have the means will get fed up with the downward spiral, leading to a negative feedback in life quality and revenue. Politicians in SF always money hungry will then try to hit the 'billionaires' where it hurts, 'their wallets', and try to raise taxes leading to more people leaving. Not everyone who is leaving is because of the cost of living, its also people who are fed up.

The quality of life thing is huge, half of my Wife's good friends left the bay area the past year or two, a bunch of my co-workers in tech left and alot of it was people are sick of how poorly the place is run and is turning into a dump. I left in the summer and will never return, I grew up in the area so its been bittersweet, but I don't regret moving one bit.

Where are you (and these others you mention) moving to?

My family moved from Mountain View (where we were paying $4800/month rent for a 2 bedroom apartment) to rural Olympia Washington state, where we're paying about $1500 a month less for a mortgage on a house with five times the square footage and five acres of woods. We moved to the SF Bay Area in 2009.

The 11 minute drive from our house into town (capital of Washington state) is ironically shorter than a drive to the nearest Safeway in Mountain View at certain times of the day.

My wife and I daily appreciate the fortune of having the luxury of working full time remote. Most people don't have that.

We very much enjoyed our time in the SF Bay Area. It's a beautiful place full of excellent people. "things" just got too out of balance over the past decade plus.

What the heck, I'll go on a little bit more after noting that we loved living in the SF Bay Area when we did.

Our electricity is almost all hydro, and so very green. Our only vehicle is a Tesla which we charge at home.

Our home is relatively close to the Puget sound but we're nearly 100 feet above it, which will make us proof against 21st century sea level rise, hurricanes (currently impossible here) and tsunamis. At the same time, the very large amount of water near us strongly moderates our temperature fluctuations, similar to but stronger than the same effect on the peninsula in the SF Bay Area.

There's no state income taxes. Property tax is slightly higher than in the SF Bay Area. Sales tax is about the same.

Finally, this is my current view: https://www.realms.org/pics/woods-outside.jpg

You may not deal with tropical cyclones, but please understand that where you live the weather can become quite violent.

https://www.climate.washington.edu/stormking/mainindex.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbus_Day_Storm_of_1962

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Northwest_windstorm

Thanks for these, I was aware after researching (for years!) places where we'd want our 'forever home'.

Above, I specifically called out something you can't generally build for, which is flooding. Flooding comes either from water running down hill or from below, due to rising bodies of water. Our house is at the top of a very shallow rise/'hill', so we don't have to worry about the former. That we're more than 100 feet above any relevant body of water protects us from the latter.

The other items are generally about high winds, and this house is pretty much proof against that. It was massively over-built.

The only thing it could not withstand is a direct hit from a powerful tornado.

I wasn't aware of https://www.climate.washington.edu/stormking/mainindex.html great resource, thanks again!

No offense, but you're digging back to 1962 to find that weather. I live in the Seattle area, and the worst thing about it is the seasonal depression. Granted, I'm originally from the south eastern US, so I'm used to hurricanes, but this place is a cake walk. There are occasional winds of 15 miles an hour or so, but compared to the majority of the rest of the country, it's fairly isolated from inclement weather phenomenon.

Understand and agree with what you're saying! "Easy weather" was one of the big wins in our decision making process to move here.

On the other hand, we're planning on the 70 year time horizon, which is basically reasonable MAX_AGE for our teenage son, so looking many decades back was appropriate for us as well.

Further, as more and more energy ends up captured in the atmosphere, we expect rare atmospheric events to become a lot less rare.

> it's fairly isolated from inclement weather phenomenon.

Indeed, we're loving it, especially given that we generally like cool, wet weather as a baseline.

What's the earthquake risk - are you close to any faults? That's always been my concern about the west coast.

The Seattle area had a big earthquake about 20 years ago[0], which was most certainly felt in Olympia. But that's the only time I've felt the earth tremble in the 20 years I've lived in the Seattle area. But WA does get them once in a while. [1] Personally, it's low on my list of things I worry about.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_Nisqually_earthquake [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes_in_Washing...

1 in 3 of a very large earthquake hitting in the next 50 years: https://today.oregonstate.edu/archives/2010/may/odds-huge-qu...

That could cause a large to very large tsunami.

The place we selected is proof against any Tsunami, and massively over-built to handle large earthquakes.

Is elevation what makes it Tsunami-proof? Or was there another way you made it Tsunami-proof?

Rent was $4800 a month? No wonder I don't know anyone who lives there anymore. 3 of my coworkers moved out in the last year, two permanently, one decided to be a temporary nomad but probably won't go back.

I'll keep working remote from flyover country, thanks (lots of beautiful places here too if you don't mind the snow!)

Yeah, it was kind of nuts. It was a bit more than some others because it had a gasp connected garage and two small 'outside' areas attached.

>The 11 minute drive from our house into town (capital of Washington state) is ironically shorter than a drive to the nearest Safeway in Mountain View at certain times of the day.

This is such a huge thing when it comes to quality of life. The traffic in the bay area is completely absurd. There is no rush hour. There's a small window around 10:00am-11:30am where you can just get in the car and run somewhere real quick without sitting in it. Otherwise it turns a quick trip to the grocery store into an hour long affair. I can remember working in Oakland, and living in Pleasant Hill, and if there was an accident at the tunnel, you're literally just sitting at the office until 8-9pm because the entire route is a parking lot. It's the number one thing I am thankful for since moving away.

Right; traffic was one of the main reasons we lived so close 'in'. Over 11 years, we lived in three different apartments, always within 10 minutes bike ride to Caltrain, and every place I worked was within a 10 minute bike ride from Caltrain.

Bicycling around takes time, but I considered it worth while since it doubled as good, low impact cardio.

We also stayed primarily in Mountain View because of the schools.

But yeah, from 2009-2020, traffic went from somewhat manageable to batshit crazy.

I moved to Southern California, the others moved to: Tahoe(Nevada side), Southern California, Cincinnati Ohio, South of the bay area. Bend OR, Scottsdale Arizona, Springdale South Carolina

Isn't SoCal equally expensive?

no, not by a long shot. It's expensive comparative to local socal jobs but not to tech salaries(both me and my wife work in bay area tech companies). For comparison I want to live in 3/3 bdrm house in a good school district that does not need a total overhaul. In the Bay Area, good school district cities (Palo Alto, Cupertino, Menlo Park, Los Altos, etc) all have houses priced close to $2M+ starting for a 3 bdrm house. In socal where I live now places are 800k - 1.1M and the schools are 9's & 10's. The mortgage we now have is 40% cheaper than the bay area house we had, and in the bay area all of our schools were 3's and 5's.

Wow, do you mind sharing where you were moving from? Only 6-10 schools around me.

> and in the bay area all of our schools were 3's and 5's.

That sounds more like the South Bay. Try East.

Most of the South Bay is 8-10 for schools - it has literally some of the best schools in the country. Even in East Palo Alto you're looking at a 7 for HS. To get consistent 3-5s on the Western side of the Bay, you're probably in SF.

That's not true. There are many lower rated schools in Sunnyvale and San Jose. But it's inconsistent; there are pockets of high and low ratings even within single school districts.

I used to think so, until I saw the house recently sold by someone who worked on the Alien movies (David Giler?). $2 million for a really nice house in the Hollywood Hills, which looked to be actually designed, not just some standard floor plan from Tolt Brothers. In the Redmond, WA area, $2 million might get you something that isn't a 4700 sq. ft. box with windows. Hell, San Diego is looking downright affordable these days. And that's from a Seattle perspective. I can imagine a Bay Area resident with some equity (I have a big imagination) would do well moving just about anywhere else, including SoCal.

New Hampshire

New Hampshire is an underrated place to live. imo the only thing lacking there is diversity. Oceans, mountains, nice hot summers, gorgeous fall and snowy winters. Close to Boston airport and low taxes. Beautiful state, I miss my time there!

New Orleans and Denver - both fun cities with a much lower cost of living and surprisingly vibrant tech/startup communities

I don't have specific statistics to back this up, but Austin TX and surrounding communities are seeing huge growth with, anecdotally, a disproportionate number of Californians.

The perception of this, at least, is so widespread that you'll see quite a lot on community social media spaces, telling the "immigrants" that they're welcome, but please stop voting for the kinds of policies that you're trying to escape.

> Austin TX and surrounding communities are seeing huge growth with, anecdotally, a disproportionate number of Californians

Most of Texas has been dealing with CA transplants since last housing crisis, or before, so 12+ years now. Austin area in particular is where the liberals usually land. And they tend to be very liberal even by traditional Austin standards and especially by Texas standards in general. Some of the recent things in Austin, particularly around tolerance of homeless, are not popular with Texans. We are generous people but not to the level of letting homeless sleep in our suburban yards. We're told we're not compassionate. But we feel these people are mostly, homeless by choice. If you take the time to watch them, it's a lifestyle for a high percentage and yes there are some who did not chose it due to drugs, PTSD, etc, and we'd support getting those people help, housing, food, etc. But not putting up tents and port-a-potties for them at the underpass. [1]

I just came back from Austin. I haven't lived there since 2007/8. Homeless there has always been a problem. As it is in almost any liberal US city. The last few years, it's gotten so much worse and letting it bleed into the suburbs makes no sense IMO. The local leaders are enabling thus inviting more homeless, etc. as happens in almost any liberal US city.

[1] As an example of something no Texan understands. My aunt told me, a lady on her Nextdoor ostracized the neighborhood for giving the homeless things they didn't need. Like food when they had food. Or food they did not like. So, she met with and created an Amazon Wish List for each person living under/near a nearby bridge freeway intersection. When my aunt clicked on it out of curiosity, it was mostly gift cards, phone minutes, electronics, etc. In my mind, things that are easily converted to cash.

People experiencing homelessness often do need things like phone minutes and electronics and gift cards for things like toothpaste or deodorant or various needs that aren’t covered by just food donations. These things are often needed in order to help themselves get out of the situation they’re in, to connect or to be presentable for opportunities that arise that might aid them (and to be able to get the phone call telling them of such opportunities). To say this is something many Texans can’t understand I disagree with strongly, and that holds for Austin as well.

Also the idea that Californians moving are responsible for pushing Austin in a more liberal direction I find untrue and a bit at odds with reality both from data presented on metro-to-metro movements [1, 2] and also with my own anecdotal experience here. I find many of the people I know who moved here from California think they’re getting away from what they consider an overtly liberal area by doing so, and in part move specifically because they believe Austin (by being in Texas) will be more conservative. From my experience having lived in Austin and in Texas (over twice as long as I’ve lived in California, which I first moved to from Austin), it is and has been more progressive than even most of the Bay Area has seemed to me (excluding Santa Cruz and Berkeley which I find comparable).

As far as what might be making it more liberal, it was a large part of the 60s and 70s counter-culture movement (Whole Foods and Wheatsville, Janis Joplin and the 13th Floor Elevators, Mother’s Cafe, etc.) the founders and artists of which were not from California, and in the case of Whole Foods and Janis actually were Austin exports to California. And also being widely more known for being a college town with large music festivals and a huge DIY scene. Austin feels more like San Jose to me these days, but it’s politics, especially when discussed with those I’ve known who were born and raised here, feel more akin to what I see and hear being discussed in places like Portland and Berkeley than what I saw and heard from those I knew in Palo Alto and Mountain View.

This is not due to Californians moving in, as even to this day the majority of Austinites are either born and raised or migrated from other parts of Texas. Even the initiative against keeping public homelessness from being criminalized was widely supported in council and by the mayor (of which I’m not aware of a single party being from California, Greg Casar who is pushing for a lot of the more progressive policies is actually from Houston and Adler went to UT and is from Washington DC).

Basically just trying to say, I disagree with the “liberal by Austin standards” idea, I think if anything you’re just seeing the city as it always was but with more political clout due to recent changes in how city council works and with a very energized mayor. The transplants from California if anything, in my anecdotal experience at least, are fairly conservative by Austin standards. But our experiences are our own.

[1] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2018/demo/geographic-mobi... [2] https://austonia.com/austin-growth

>"Given SF has been extremely heavy handed with the lockdowns"

To great effect, mind you. SF County has the lowest rate of new cases per 100k of any major city in the country by a pretty significant margin [0].

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-c...

Exactly. SF is one of the safest places to live in the US right now (as it relates to COVID)

The problem, of course, is that you can replicate that level of safety, if it matters to you, anywhere, by locking yourself in your house.

Since the US isn't an island, anytime SF loosens up, CV will immediately spike anyway, so no real advantage gained.

You end up creating a backlash.

If the vaccines live up to their advance billing some small number of lives will be saved, but it is very unclear whether, in the long run, more lives will be lost to the costs of a severe lockdown than saved by it.

> it is very unclear whether, in the long run, more lives will be lost to the costs of a severe lockdown than saved by it

I have yet to see data that shows any evidence of this theory. If you are aware of any existing data that points to this conclusion, I'd love to see it.

Did you know that the Spanish flu of 1918 wasn't really Spanish?

Edit: Okay so maybe I skipped to the punchline. Just trying to say politics influences data or lack of data.

Of course there isn't data about the long-term societal effects of a global lockdown in a modern society. But there are huge numbers of kids being denied education and social interaction right now. There are people who have lost money and are not eating right or living in healthy conditions, etc. So there are clearly going to be massive negative impacts from the mitigation, and nobody will know the scale for decades to come.

For example, just US children are on track to miss 9 million vaccinations in 2020. [1]

Worldwide poverty and deferred healthcare for vaccines and cancer screenings will have a decade the rack up an order of magnitude more deaths than will ever be directly attributed to COVID.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/18/health/coronavirus-childh...

Children can, and, according to the CDC, should get vaccinations during lockdowns.

"CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommend every child continues to receive routine vaccinations during the COVID-19 outbreak." [0]

Personally, I'm hoping vaccinations against COVID are what ends the pandemic.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/parents/visit/vaccination-durin....

The only reasonable hypothesis I've heard for an increase in number of deaths due to lockdown is suicide and deferred medical care for non-COVID cases.

The US is running at an average 1500 deaths a day now.

We lost about 132 deaths per day from suicide in 2019. Even if that doubles, that leave a lot of room for additional deaths due to deferred medical care. The numbers just don't add up.

Just to be a bit pedantic, these aren’t apples and oranges comparisons. It’s common to measure lives lost in quality-of-life adjusted years, since losing an 85-year old to COVID is a lot different than losing a 20-year old to suicide or due to deferred medical treatment. (The ages are exaggerated, but obviously COVID victims tend to be much older.)

"Since April, 1.9 million excess years of life have been lost, 13% above historical average. Over the course of the pandemic, we found age and sex contributions to excess YLL have shifted. Deaths among adults 65 and older accounted for 80% of excess YLL in April but only 36% of excess YLL in June. Since April, working age adults 20-64 have accounted for 47% of excess YLL, and males 20 to 64 have contributed 34%."

April, May, and June had around 10% excess YLL. July and August had 17.5% excess YLL.

https://healthcostinstitute.org/hcci-research/the-impact-of-...

And? The parent point was that lockdowns might cause other kinds of death (suicide, deferred medical treatment). All-cause mortality obviously encodes those non-COVID deaths, there is no way to tell them apart. Since the cited study lacks the necessary data (and openly states as much), using it to support any claims about the impact of COVID vs lockdowns is simply begging the question.

My point was that dismissing COVID because it "only affects the elderly" is not accurate.

The data I've seen on suicides is cautiously optimistic in many places.

"Nevertheless, a reasonably consistent picture is beginning to emerge from high income countries. Reports suggest either no rise in suicide rates (Massachusetts, USA11; Victoria, Australia13; England14) or a fall (Japan,9 Norway15) in the early months of the pandemic. The picture is much less clear in low income countries, where the safety nets available in better resourced settings may be lacking. News reports of police data from Nepal suggest a rise in suicides,12 whereas an analysis of data from Peru suggests the opposite.10"

https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4352

There is good data saying that people have delayed medical care (including me), but I can't find anything about detailed results.

On the other hand, if you are trying to distinguish COVID from the effects of trying to control it, I would like to point out that none of the "lockdown" restrictions have restricted access to medical care. That is either a personal choice or a consequence of overwhelmed facilities.

I'm not dismissing it, and your quote is not something that I ever said -- who are you quoting?

Doctors, nurses, EMTs, transit agency workers, taxi drivers, grocery workers, bank tellers, police, firemen, street cleaners, nursing home staff – none of them can lock themselves in their house and continue to get paychecks like the average tech worker. Creating a safe environment for essential workers, homeless, elderly and otherwise financially struggling folks is something most other cities are failing at, and I'm happy San Francisco is not prioritizing the feelings of bros who need to go out to bars.

Other than doctors, can any of those groups actually still afford to live in SF?

They still work in SF, whether they live there or not.

> The problem, of course, is that you can replicate that level of safety, if it matters to you, anywhere, by locking yourself in your house.

Yeah. But this idea breaks down as soon as one needs to leave the house for basic necessities. In that case, you would be much better off in a community which takes the issue seriously.

> more lives will be lost to the costs of a severe lockdown than saved by it

Not many lives should be lost by lockdowns, if at all. Perhaps if this issue wasn't so politicized, governments could intervene (and some have, in Europe) to help those in need.

> If the vaccines live up to their advance billing some small number of lives will be saved, but it is very unclear whether, in the long run, more lives will be lost to the costs of a severe lockdown than saved by it.

https://youtu.be/bzh6HwN0gbw?t=398

Better yet, watch the whole thing. And check the public numbers.

Stop spreading misinformation.

In the past 14 days, 99.798% of residents in San Francisco County have NOT received a positive COVID-19 test.

See for yourself at https://thecovidcomplex.com/state/california/san%20francisco...

Full disclosure, I built this website. Data is sourced from the New York Times. It’s the same dataset they use to power the interactive map that was linked. And I just discovered I have an error sharing links to counties with spaces. Go figure lol

Edit: 4 minutes since posting and a downvote. At least explain yourself.

Didn't downvote you, but that 99.7% number is a bit meaningless unless you also state the number of people who were tested at all. Not receiving a positive result due to not being tested in the first place means nothing.

Hi, I appreciate the comment and discussion.

I disagree with the statement that the number is meaningless. Media outlets are free to singularly report the number of positive cases. I see it all over mainstream media (CNN being the worst offender), Twitter, etc.

What's the issue with simply reversing that metric to show many people are COVID negative?

Final note, I'm happy to make updates based on additional data but public datasets are slim pickings. And I'm not in to tapping individual state/county datasets.

NYT publishes daily case counts and death counts across the United States by county.

edit: COVID negative is unequivocally the incorrect term to use. That was a mental mistake on my part. The specific term I use is “did not get a positive COVID test”.

First, just because some entity does it, "The Media", doesn't mean it's good.

Second, the number of positive cases is an affirmative result from people that have taken, and failed, covid tests. Your metric takes people who have never taken a test and lumps them into "COVID negative," which is pretty self-evidently extremely misleading.

I would report test positivity rate if I had a source. I’m not trying to hide anything.

I contend that if you are not taking a test it’s because you didn’t need a test.

It’s also misleading to report only case positivity. Some areas of the country allow only people who have active symptoms to get a test thereby skewing the results.

> I contend that if you are not taking a test it’s because you didn’t need a test.

Another reason you might not take a test is that you don't know you need it.

Life is full of risk and trade-off’s. I document my grievances on the About page.

Asymptotic transmission is real (per the CDC) so I’ll accept that as fact. Ultimately if you view yourself as a high risk then it should be a personal responsibility to protect yourself. I believe my family and I to be low risk - citizens should be free to decide their tolerance for risk and act accordingly. Other families across the country and world have similar feelings about health.

I’m frustrated watching small business owners get crushed, bad their employees lose their livelihood.

There is significant damage being done with shutdowns and lockdowns that is with great chance worse than this disease itself.

I'm frustrated too.

But I think your point is strong enough to be presented without exaggeration or misleading.

This is a very misleading statistic you're providing, especially to people who may not be as data-oriented as us, and also a very broad assumption that definitely doesn't hold. Case positivity is a real number based on number of tests, it's not making inferences on things like the rates among those who haven't been tested.

I understand this is your site and you built it, and it's hard to let that go. But, I would implore you to rethink it until you get the data needed to add real insights to the conversations, not misleading stats based on what you have now.

Also, I have consciously avoided the term COVID negative. Exactly why I write “have not had a COVID positive test”.

But you have used it though.

> What's the issue with simply reversing that metric to show many people are COVID negative?

Thanks for calling me out. It was a mistake in my earlier comment and I have added an edit.

I need to do better.

> metric takes people who have never taken a test and lumps them into "COVID negative,"

True, but the statistic is still useful with respect to comparisons to other locations in the country under the same reporting constraints.

...which hnrodey didn't include in the comment.

The media reports the _known_ positive cases, i.e. those that were confirmed by tests and/or doctor diagnosis. There are also a vast majority of asymptomatic cases which are not generally tested or even contact-traced in the US.

We can't make claims about how much of the population at large is healthy because we don't actually know who is healthy and who is covid-positive/infectious/asymptomatic (and this is precisely why there are indiscriminate mask mandates in SF and elsewhere)

Because while that statement is technically mostly factual, it leads to a implication - like the one you make right here "to show many people are COVID negative" - that this metric somehow means that this many people are COVID negative, which is utterly false.

"Simply reversing" that metric gets a number that mostly shows how many people have not been tested within 14 days and thus noone has any idea on their COVID status. It's negligent to imply that this means that they are or would be negative.

Furthermore, even the original data point seems not literally true - this is based on net new cases, which would exclude people who became a net new case 15 or more days ago but actually have received a positive test recently because they are, for example, in the hospital right now and have gotten a repeated test that shows that they are still positive.

I would argue that making factually true statements for which the obvious implication actually is not true is inappropriate - and if it's not by mistake (as it seems out of your other comments) then it's intentionally misleading and should be downvoted.

Large numbers of positive results are an entirely different kind of data than large numbers of the opposite (neutral + negative).

One shows the minimum scale of the problem - if it's big, that's a problem, even if it's no bigger than the value reported. E.g. if 10% tested positive, that'd be unambiguously worrying / news-worthy.

The other shows the maximum awareness of a problem. If it's big, you have no idea if awareness is low (many neutrals) or if incidence is low (many negatives). Everyone in SF could have COVID, and that 99.798% number could still be factually correct. Or it could be that only those .202% got it. There's no way to know from that number alone.

I think it's harder to grasp the negative counts, because this is essentially the population of the city almost every day. The statistical change from day to day would be less than 1% so it's hard for humans to grasp a significant increase in cases. If the daily cases were to go up by 10x (2000 daily cases), it would still show 881,000 negative cases. If it went from 881,000 negative to 879,000 negative, should we panic?

On your site, El Paso is still at around 98% negative tests, which makes it appear like everything is under control when in reality the hospitals were mostly overrun and had to send patients outside of the county.

> What's the issue with simply reversing that metric to show many people are COVID negative?

There are three groups. Positive, negative, and untested. The untested group is the biggest, and you can't call them COVID negative, because there's really no reason. They're not (yet) either positive or negative.

I used the term "COVID negative" in an earlier post and that was a huge mistake and that mistake has occurred only on this HN thread. I added an edit to that comment to say I was wrong.

No where on thecovidcomplex.com do I use the term "COVID negative".

I had no idea it was your site.

I didn't, and cannot, downvote. However my BS detector immediately went off when I read the phrase "99.798% of residents in San Francisco County have NOT received a positive COVID-19 test." That percentage doesn't really mean anything in this context. More meaningful might be number of positive test results as compared with total number of tests I suppose.

You should be skeptical of everything you read on the internet.

I applaud people who want to confirm what I have provided. All data is available on the page and I’ve provided links to all sources.

Oh, woah, it's not about confirming what's provided or believing everything on the internet. I'm actually giving you the benefit of the doubt that the raw data is correct, and that the statistic you've provided is correct. I'm questioning why you would give that statistic given the misleading nature of it -- and no, other people doing misleading things is not a good reason (as you imply in other comments).

What proportion of residents of other California counties have not received a positive test? Other states?

It’s all there.

https://thecovidcomplex.com/states

Don't be so quick to assume that this is due to policy. SF county also has one of the lowest marriage and birth rates in the country. Large households, multi-generational households, are one the biggest contributors to the rate of spread.

SF has plenty of those. Marriage and birth rates are low but immigrant populations are high. There are plenty of crowded multi-generational households in SF, it's just that they're largely immigrants rather than native-born San Franciscans starting families. (This is also born out in the racial COVID statistics, where infection rates are much higher for Hispanics and lower-income Asians than for whites and high-income Asians.)

And now there are 4x as many deaths due to drug overdoses (by fentanyl alone) than Covid! [1]

If you really care about public safety, you should pay attention to homelessness, drug addiction, and the problems in the streets! It's killing people 4x as fast as Covid, and yet nobody cares! This is exactly the problem that GP was talking about, and you come back with a smug "well our Covid rates are really low" comment.

You're ignoring the point by looking only at Covid. Look at the rest of the data. A city is more than its covid rate.

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Tw...

> Older Black men living alone in residential hotels are dying at rates far higher than their portion of the city population. And yet most of us will see these statistics, think they’re a shame, and quickly move on.

> Even as [we] devote tremendous time and attention to quashing COVID-19, another public health epidemic that has killed far fewer San Franciscans. As of Saturday, that tally was 123.

> We’re a city that freaks out about a jogger running past without a mask, but doesn’t blink at someone injecting themselves in the neck on a Tenderloin sidewalk.

> That puts San Francisco on track to lose more than 700 people to drugs in 2020 — or nearly two every day. That’s a shocking rise from the 441 people who died of drug overdoses in 2019 and the 259 who died the year before that.

The article suggests the number was already growing at an alarming rate even before covid. While this is tragic, I'm not sure we can attribute these deaths solely to covid lockdowns.

It also behooves us to consider the practicality of public health measures. It's extremely easy for a californian mayor to tell people to stay home/wear masks and get a relatively high level of compliance. Getting people to stop using drugs is a much taller order.

I’m pretty sure the solution to fentanyl overdose deaths has almost nothing to do with getting people to stop using drugs.

> If you really care about public safety, you should pay attention to homelessness, drug addiction, and the problems in the streets! It's killing people 4x as fast as Covid, and yet nobody cares!

And do WHAT, for them? What concrete thing are you supposed to DO?

No matter what YOU think is a solution, most of the homeless will refuse consent. Now what?

You can't just force a person into mental health or drug treatment without their consent unless they commit a crime or are an immediate danger to themselves.

Needle exchanges help. Methadone clinics help. And for the people who don't comply?

Most of the "homeless solutions" are effectively "move them somewhere else--preferably jail". That's really what people who want SF to "get control" of the homeless problem actually want.

Edit: Okay all you genius downvoters, let's hear your "solutions" for the SF homeless problem. I'm waiting with bated breath for your glorious insights ...

I upvoted you because I want to discuss your point.

I have a theory that homelessness is an industry that employs tons of people who are unable to find work elsewhere. The homeless are the product.

Non profit org, public sector employees, donations, city employees, univ PhD researchers, grants etc...for every dollar, more than 60%(I will have to look up the exact number)..will go towards managing the homeless rather than aiding the homeless find a roof over their heads.

This might seem like a cynical way to view this but there is no reason why SF is spending in excess of 500 million dollars in ONE YEAR and still have homeless on the street.

There is literally zero incentive to solve homelessness. Now imagine the problem is resolved..how many people will be out of work? These are not drug addicts or mentally ill..they are educated and normal functioning people who need jobs..they need to be employed. Without a job, they will be unemployed and likely unhoused due to economic necessity.

Of course, people can migrate out of bay area. That would be the rational thing to do. Millions of immigrants do this every single day. But Americans won’t travel coast to coast in the worlds most boring homogeneous country where any freeway or Walmart or mcD in CA is no diff than in NH if economic survival and upward mobility is the imperative.

That’s my 2c anyways.

Someone originally turned me on to CityJournal here on HN some years ago. I'm pretty sure it was this article that did it buried in some comment https://www.city-journal.org/html/sidewalks-san-francisco-13.... I'm not sure if it was coined there but the author uses this term the "homelessness-industrial complex". It was a pretty shocking thing to read back then to contemplate something so cynical, but I think these outcomes can manifest even without outright malice and scheming. So I hear you on the cynical take being a downer, it's all so frustrating the lack of progress.

We have hundreds if not thousands homeless and heroin consuments in the capital of Switzerland. However not many deaths. There are multiple things including giving them straight up clean heroin for, free that really helped getting this 'under control'.

For comparison, San Francisco has about the same COVID-19 death rate as Zimbabwe or Uzbekistan.

San Francisco, the city in a perpetual death spiral.

The number of bad "SF's gonna die!" takes on HN/twitter is so absurd I now read them with a "So bad it's good" type mindset. The number of times WSJ opinions alone have declared California dead is probably 20+.

The thing that will stop the oft remarked upon "death spiral" is, ahem, the fucking CA housing market. Where there are fluctuations in expensive asset prices, people see opportunity. If housing prices in SF drop by 5%, it's not like all the wealthy individuals who can buy just sit on the sidelines. Younger people with lesser means see opportunities to get rent control at a decent price etc. I'm looking forward to retractions of all these level zero takes when rent prices spike in July.

This is of course nothing new, for instance NY has gone through many ups and downs of its own and all along many in the media claimed "NY is dying!"

It is laughable with the number of articles that state this recently, I do think things are different as large name brand companies have moved out very recently:

Pinterest paid big money to break its lease to move out of SF, Stripe is moving out, Charles Schwab and McKesson, and Bechtel also moved their HQ out of SF and CA in general.

These moves were all done pre-covid but as a bay area resident the past year has been horrible like none other, fires raging all summer and toxic smoke, pg&e shutting off the power all the time, crime is really, really bad. I had stuff stolen from my house, a first of living an entire lifetime in the bay area.

I'm a pretty pessimistic individual, at least my wife tells me so, but I am actually very optimistic about California and the Bay Area. I think COVID will end up being the kick in the pants it needs to start dealing with many of the problems in the state and region. A scare or two about companies fleeing the state is necessary to get the state/counties/cities to cut back on suffocating red tape for small businesses. And if there is one place in the world setup to fight a big climate problem like fires, it is the academic and technological hive mind of California.

Back to the bad takes: from what I've read the takes are all from people who moved out of the Bay. Some people come here, start their careers, then have the luxury of leaving and working from wherever. That's great, but there will always be a batch of new grads looking for work and honestly the concentration there is so high they could lose 20% of the companies by market cap and this would still be the place to start out, along with a few other large metros. Just because you leave doesn't mean the city stops.

> crime is really, really bad

Actually violent crime is at an all-time low. See this article about homicides for example: https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/With-41-killings-i...

It looks like you were thinking of property crime, but I wonder what the statistics say about that, too.

The number of times WSJ opinions alone have declared California dead is probably 20+.

Where I first heard the idea that CA will collapse because "everyone is moving to NV to avoid CA taxes" was the WSJ...thirty years ago. I see that CA is still there, and far more populated than it was 30 years ago. A stopped clock might be right twice a day, but I'll be dead before the WSJ (or anyone) finally strikes gold with their "everyone is leaving CA" prediction.

The difference is that there's a hell of a lot more bandwidth available to the average remote worker than there was 30 years ago.

I suspect the next big tech wave is going to be software-enabled hardware (think 3D printing, or drones, or robotics) or software-enabled biotech (think Verily, Calico, or DeepMind's protein-folding breakthrough today). Neither of those can be done anywhere with an Internet connection; they're going to require close collaboration between software developers, data scientists, electrical/mechanical/biomedical engineers, and actual scientists (physicists, chemists, biologists, and material scientists). The Bay Area is excellently situated to take advantage of this, having 2 world-class universities, a number of smaller colleges, thriving industries in all of these, and lots of capital. Much of the rest of the country, not so much.

I suspect that the days of SaaS and pure web or mobile app developers are numbered. That field is increasingly getting commoditized.

>I suspect the next big tech wave is going to be software-enabled hardware (think 3D printing, or drones, or robotics) or software-enabled biotech (think Verily, Calico, or DeepMind's protein-folding breakthrough today). Neither of those can be done anywhere with an Internet connection; they're going to require close collaboration between software developers, data scientists, electrical/mechanical/biomedical engineers, and actual scientists (physicists, chemists, biologists, and material scientists). The Bay Area is excellently situated to take advantage of this, having 2 world-class universities, a number of smaller colleges, thriving industries in all of these, and lots of capital. Much of the rest of the country, not so much.

This comment is a great example of the SV bubble mindset. The Midwest, Northeast and gulf coast have far better existing infrastructure and workforces if your goal is to create products that have a physical existence in excess of what it takes to represent ones and zeros.

I'll be the first to tell you that I'll vote for any despot who promises to screw the people of Boston but even I have to admit that if your goal is to do some BioMed thing the existing industry there is far better poised to take advantage of it than SV is. The Gulf coast is where you go if you want to do things with chemicals. The eastern midwest is where you go for heavy industry type manufacturing. Specialty composites, aerospace, electronics manufacturing capability is sprinkled throughout the area east of the Mississippi (though sprinkled less densely in the more agricultural parts of the south and midwest).

It's just laughable that you think that SV, a place that's spent decades driving out anything that doesn't have tech-size margins, has the existing workforce and infrastructure to compete against the places that already have these industries.

I'm not talking about doing biomed better than Boston, or chemistry better than the Gulf Coast, or manufacturing better than the Midwest. New Jersey (AT&T / Bell Labs) used to be the place to do telecommunications. Silicon Valley is not in the telecommunications industry, it's in the Internet industry. I'm talking about which industries will replace BioMed, chemistry, and manufacturing.

Silicon Valley is really good at 3 things:

1.) Eating our old.

2.) Replacing humans with computers.

3.) Thinking we know better than everyone else.

Makes us kind of insufferable, but that's precisely the mindset you need when your goal is to replace large segments of the economy with machines and take all the spoils for yourself (and your co-conspirators). If you're going to play nice and respect established wisdom, you'll never even bother embarking on such a project. SV's greatest strength is the large number of people who can be convinced to apply their technical knowledge to a project that sounds crazy and doesn't exist yet.

I don’t know if you are being facetious, but there are other reasons Silicon Valley is unparalleled to (almost) any other region in the USA.

Weather. Creativity blooms when you don’t have little nitpicks stealing your time. Winter snow takes a huge toll on productivity. Not to mention the time suck of travel time, salted roads, leaking roofs, heating costs.

And I can tell you exactly how it works..because I farm, this is my religion. 8 months of three glorious seasons without a single drop of rain AND no drought. It’s a miracle. In the farming universe, this is heaven. This is why CA is the golden state.

While many do complain about the cost of living in California, it is high only because we subsidize a very fat chunk of people who can’t afford to live in the golden state. Our population is 40 million. (For comparison Canada is 20..NZ is 5, Sweden is 10, India is 1300 China is 1400)

A very small percentage of California takes care of almost most of the service sector and public sector and pensions and public school system through property taxes. It is the high cost of living here that ploughs money back into the economy to create capital and more businesses and more building and new roads.

A city prospers when it has economic churn. We did it for the region and to a less impressive extent, for the whole state. When everything is still and stable, there will be no economic prosperity. This is the basis for why capitalism works to rise millions out of poverty. Even in quasi non capitalistic economies.it is the difference between Russia and China.

Winter freezes all churn. We all know how much sunlight has an effect on humans and productivity. With both physical and mental activities. This is nothing to sneeze at..

Back to California, when the supported 99% has been encouraged to be spiteful and ungrateful to the golden goose of tech SV that was the 1%, the downside of this is going to be painful to watch. All the public school socialism taught by unionized teachers to weaponise entire generations is going to backfire.

The majority of the creme de la creme of SV were mostly educated OUTSIDE of California public education system. What does that tell us? I wish someone would do a study of that at UC. California SV benefitted from reverse brain drain. What does it say about our public school system? When kids are talking about privilege and colonization, that’s fine. I guess that’s an education too. But that is not going to pay the unfunded pension liabilities of their teachers’ Union.

California has been conspired against and murdered. This demise will be longer lasting than most.

Everyone predicting a mass-remote trend is kidding themselves. Don’t underestimate how fast human minds will forget about this pandemic in a time span of less than 5 years.

Covid will end and the majority of employers will want you back in the office at least some or most of the time.

The only reason employers are okay with full remote right now is because of legal liability.

Sure, there are full remote culture employers but they are in the minority.

If bandwidth was the only issue then you’d have seen Silicon Valley spread to smaller/cheaper American cities a long time ago. In reality the network effects of industry hubs are significant and they exist throughout the world.

Saying that Silicon Valley tech is gonna pack their bags and dip out of town is kind of like saying the Ohio State Agricultural Science program is going to move its campus to New York City to attract more students.

This is a dynamic system with politicians changing economic policies for the better and worse over time. If the articles are written during "worse" times for businesses, then they might have been 100% right even though the predictions never come true.

It's like predicting that a ship is going to hit an iceberg if and only if the pilot doesn't/can't/won't change course in time.

Attacking these predictions with "haha weren't they stupid" is about as helpful as attacking various failed climate predictions which have been forestalled by environmental policy changes and technological advances, among other course corrections.

In reality it takes much longer than 30 years to topple empires as large as California (or the Bay Area) and it will often appear externally healthy right before the crash. Afterward we all know the drill where politicians will claim that "no one could have seen it coming", it was just an unlucky confluence of events and there was really nothing they could have done to prevent it.

You clearly don't frequent the WSJ opinion section. Try searching for "site:wsj.com california" on Google and let us know what you get. Dig a little deeper and you'll find that what's actually happening is the Murdoch's are allowing a Fox Newsification of the opinion section, essentially a compromise between the actual journalists there and trash/gutter opinion pieces intended to push a narrative. There's even news about this news[1]. So no, this isn't some game of 19 dimensional chess, its just a stupid false narrative being pushed by people with power, vested interests, massive jealousy, thin skin, and many grudges.

[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/159953/will-wall-street-jour...

what do you expect? The city to actually disappear?? Of course not.

But the quality of life in the city is in death spiral. A lot more crime and a lot more homeless and infrastructure is in disarray

I expect Detroit at the very least.

> This is of course nothing new, for instance NY has gone through many ups and downs of its own and all along many in the media claimed "NY is dying!"

The same could be said of Detroit. Until the 1960s, it was unquestionably the fastest booming major metro in the US. But at one point or another, the "price discount of a lifetime" just becomes an attempt to catch a falling knife.

The weather alone will ensure SF never becomes Detroit.

Detroit is an interesting comparison, it is hard to imagine right now, but I won't count anything out completely. Obviously the factors there were very different. Detroit collapsed because consumers went elsewhere, not the labor.

Edit: clarification/wording

leading to a negative feedback in life quality and revenue

https://www.city-journal.org/san-franciscos-municipal-budget

And the city's budget has grown by about 50% in ten years.

A good example that free money from the sky rarely bring fortunes...

I am glad I am no longer living in San Francisco. Going to work there is like the tech equivalent of going to work at an oil rig.

Good. Riddance. (SF resident of 30 years). I used to lament having to commute 2 hours to SV, but then SV came here, and boy, the City has gone to shit because of it.

I'm not sure if I buy the quality of life argument, at least in the context of the very well-paid tech employees. The "ambient" quality of life in many prominent areas has been fairly abysmal for years (since long before COVID-19) and these well-paid residents simply avoid this by Ubering from one isolated "nice area" to another. I doubt that incrementally less public funding for education, cleaning, homeless, and drug problems is something that most of these well-paid residents would notice. They'll just keep paying to maintain their "nice areas" and Uber from one to the next, just like it has been for the last 9 years I lived in SF.

So, you're saying there's a chance I could afford to move there one day? Sounds dope.

I lived in SF (and worked in tech) 2012-2013. I could see problems, but it certainly wasn't "turning into a dump" at that point.

Your argument seems to basically be, once the high-salaried tech workers leave, the city will get worse. But as far as I can tell, the presence of the high-salaried tech workers has been making the city worse over the last decade, and if you think it's anywhere near "a dump," I think a lot of people will be glad to get back the SF of years past (such as the SF of a couple of years before I arrived, before the second startup boom, before modern venture capital existed, before Uber and Airbnb, during the recession and the dot-com bust - the SF about which people like me said, I'd like to move there).

I agree with you. I have lived in SF since 2005. In my opinion, the problem is that the tech workers are not engaged with the city. They are here for the jobs, and resent the city. The high prices chased the old SFers away, the artists and eccentrics who enjoyed and loved SF ... and the influx was such that there was no opportunity to pass along the culture. More people needed to be shown what was fun and groovy about SF, than the existing population had the capacity to do.

What was neat about SF circa 2005-2012 is that folks in general were happy, excited, and proud to be here. Current day tech workers complain a lot, while contributing little (presence, acceptance, consciousness) to help solve anything: viz the comments on this post. Now they dance upon its grave as they decamp to Montana or Ohio, etc. So in a sense part of the problem is just the mood of the place.

If you ever read Jane Jacobs "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" she describes exactly the cycle we are experiencing: a cheap place is colonized by artists and eccentrics, it becomes cool, this attracts mainstream folks, this makes the place hyped & expensive, the people who made it cool move away, it then becomes lame, eventually it decays, is abandoned, and becomes cheap again.

Be zen, this is all part of the normal life of the world. In the fullness of time, SF will have many more boom and bust cycles.

Insert any decade in the past and you can tell the same story...

Netcraft confirms: SF is dead! jwz on suicide watch. IMHO SF will survive forever. The geography of the region is just too damned good for the density. I'm in LA for some time because it's nicer this time of year but I have enjoyed my time in SF and all the things I can do there.

SF is in a resource curse situation right now. The coming winter will kill the parasitic insects in government off. Few elected governments have the incentives to set up a 'sovereign wealth fund' equivalent because the ones who use it will be seen as heroes and the ones who fund it as villains. So just as the winter helps temperate climate countries survive insect hordes, shocks like this help societies survive their bureaucrats.

A good argument could be made that it makes sense to leave people's money to them, but for gold rush states the right thing to do is to extract some rent from transient visitors into a longer term program so that it can weather shocks. If they have the incentives to protect the wealth fund.

No CA or SF program can do that, however, since there is a hedonic sink in the shape of CalPERS. Any money you save, CalPERS will eat. And CalPERS will grow whether you feed it or not. And now that CalPERS is big enough, you don't get to choose whether to feed it. CalPERS will feed.

A. CalPers pumps a lot of money into VC (especially those most subject to local regulation). I don’t know if the latest boom would have been possible without that. B. I don’t know. Detroit is just as corrupt as ever.

Well, you don't need to take my tax dollars to give it to CalPERS so they can put it into Private Equity to get a 10% IRR. You can just leave it with me and maybe I'll put it in there myself.

This article is a rehash of existing information and an insult to tech workers that were forced out (such as myself).

If the day to day living conditions were actually acceptable, many people would have stayed during the pandemic. The real problem is the sky high cost of housing with a low quality of life.

I put up with increasing crime, dangerous grime (such as needles in bike lanes) and tent cities on sidewalks all over the place for a decade until my brain couldn't take it anymore.

I have no problem paying Zurich level prices to live in SF due to its surrounding beauty, great opportunities and people but the mismanagement of the city has proven the high costs do not come with high quality of life.

I would share more but I'm typing on my phone, I'm just disappointed to see "techies" still being blamed and called money hungry just because people are looking the other way at other problems.

I was in SF a couple times for work and i was absolutely shocked at how disgusting it was. Granted, i'm not a city person.. insanely so - i hate cities.. but this was a new level for me. The amount of raw sewage alone that i smelt blew my mind.

I'm shocked how much people put up with there.

I spent nearly every other week in SF from 2011 until COVID hit in February. Went to NY for a conference last year and immediately thought 'holy shit this city is CLEAN'.

>Went to NY for a conference last year and immediately thought 'holy shit this city is CLEAN'

Heh, and here I am in Chicago thinking "holy shit this city is filthy!" when I go to New York. I haven't been to San Francisco in awhile, it must have deteriorated.

The harsh winters alone send Chicago's homeless places like SF.

The city's municipal workers used to wash down the surviving homeless encampments hiding from the cold on Lower Wacker with bleach and a fire hose without notice. You could differentiate Chicago's genuine homeless from the career panhandlers downtown by the bleach-stained clothes.

Not sure if they still use this practice, but it wouldn't surprise me.

It's easy to criticize SF for its negligence, but the homeless challenges are real and the affordable solutions tend to be severely lacking empathy. And SF lacks a rude force of nature doing most of the work every winter. Damp and chilly, sure, but still relatively comfortable. Chicago has it easy in this department, and its occupants aren't exactly the most empathetic towards the homeless either.

No its politics. NYC if anyone sets up a tent you can report and it'll get dumped the same day. https://portal.311.nyc.gov/article/?kanumber=KA-02253

> NYC if anyone sets up a tent you can report and it'll get dumped the same day.

Are you implying that's the right thing to do to someone living on the streets with nothing more than a tent for shelter?

Yes its better for the rest of the people who live there and probably better for the homeless guy too.

> its occupants aren't exactly the most empathetic towards the homeless either.

It's .. interesting, since i generally have no clue what to do here. I'm a super .. socialist _(or w/e)_ in that i believe in tons of government programs, but homelessness is something i almost don't believe in. It feels either a problem of:

1. Social safety nets to support working individuals experiencing tough times (i support tons of safety programs).

2. Or.. more controversially, mental health issues that shouldn't be allowed to exist in this state. Ie, if we had #1 then "no one" would be homeless - and those that are despite that, are too mentally unwell to be allowed the freedom to make such a decision.

Though, i know nothing on the subject - and advertise as much. Nevertheless, i feel far less supportive of the homeless as a result - i split it mentally as either people i want to support via social nets - or mentally unwell people needing of hospitalization. A bit off topic perhaps, but i'm always interested in peoples opinion on the subject.

I've been following the SF homeless situation pretty closely.

The numbers are that of the $300-350 million/year SF budget for homeless, 60% goes to permanent rent subsidies (low-income long-term residents.)

That leaves $120-140 million/year for actual street homeless of the reported 5,000 people. $30 million/year is given out as $500/month vouchers, leaving $90 million-$110 million unaccounted for (ie. likely social workers and bureaucrats.)

Other cities have reported:

- 100% of street homeless are on substances

- 50% of street homeless are mentally ill

That means 50% could still be treated/rehabilitated/re-employed with inexpensive programs (mailing address, internet access, showers, transitional housing.)

SF has a couple problems though:

- homeless migrate here, so it's really a federal problem

- SF rents are so high that there will be a surging tide of homeless from the city residents post-2020. The lower-middle class individuals really need to emigrate in an orderly fashion beforehand.

FYI you're shadow banned, basically all your comments are currently defaulting to [dead] and you're talking to yourself and HNers like me with showdead=yes. The comments stay that way until someone like me comes along, reads your invisible text, and vouches for it - which I've done in this case.

You must have angered the mods.

I don't (think?) i have that setting - but i read the persons message. Does it work different if it's a directly reply?

Could be, if you view their comments through their profile though you'll see what I'm referring to.

> The numbers are that of the $300-350 million/year SF budget for homeless, 60% goes to permanent rent subsidies (low-income long-term residents.)

Any idea how much effort goes into converting these individuals to productive members? Ie, getting jobs/education/etc to then exit this system?

It depends heavily on where in the city you are. There are parts of SF that definitely makes me very uncomfortable (I've lived in Hong Kong and know my way around NYC) but SF is kind of interesting in it almost feels like a collection of small cities. Union Square is very, very different from Sea Cliff and because SF is relatively small physically, it doesn't take long to go from one part to another. I think people who live here tend to get used to seeing these things and also know to avoid spending too much time in some parts of the city.

Nobody is questioning that there are good neighborhoods. Every city has good neighborhoods. What has people scratching their heads is that the worst parts of lot of cities are still a lot better than the bad parts of SF. When the comparison is between Bangalore or Sao Paulo and Zurich it's easy to write off the difference as simply wealth. But when the American "shithole cities" like Detroit, Buffalo, Gary, Reno, etc that the people of SF like to sneer at are in fact better in their worst parts than the crown jewel of "muh fifth largest economy" it really makes people wonder what the heck went so wrong.

I really don't know anyone in SF who thinks Detroit, Buffalo, etc in that way. They just tended to think of employment, amenities and available services lacking in those other cities.

If work is remote (unsure if this will remain after vaccine allows us to work in offices again) then it opens up a lot of doors.

For 98% of Californians, "muh fifth largest economy" has actually been a profound net-negative. I'm amazed people who pay $3k/month to rent to one-bedroom apt still trot this out as a brag point. "Fifth largest economy" has worked out well for the 1%, people who bought homes forever ago, and really no one else.

If WFH really gains long term traction then the SV salaries are not going to hold up either. There are really smart people in eastern europe, south america, southeast asia, etc. who will work for a fraction of the salary that a locally-domicled worker would require.

5th largest economy is the one employing all the people that are coming here in droves so not sure your argument holds up. No one would be coming here if the jobs were in Montana. $3K/mo is pennies when you're getting offers to move here to make half a million.

>But when the American "shithole cities" like Detroit

The majority of Detroit is shitty. Sure, downtown and surrounding branches (Corktown) have come back, but Detroit itself is physically huge, and can house Boston, the island of Manhattan, and San Fransisco within its borders[0]. If you don't believe me, use Streetview on Google Maps and click you way around the city. It's eyeopening.

[0] https://detroitography.com/2015/04/10/map-can-detroit-really...

Honestly laughed out loud reading GP compare the shittyness of San Francisco to how unbelievably awful and abandoned parts of Detroit are.

> when the American "shithole cities" like Detroit,

Detroit is shitty in a way that SF is not shitty. Have you ever been to the parts of Detroit that are just straight up abandoned?

Just an absurd comment altogether.

SF is the greatest city in the world in the same way that the USA is the greatest country of the world. Both of them have insanely wealthy people in extremely nice enclaves, surrounded by plenty of sub-3rd-world filth. When you put together a glossy spread of greatest places to live, you can cherrypick the wealthy parts and gloss over the folks barely eking out a subsistence living. In the meantime tons of people will be attracted to the idea of "making it" into the upper 0.1%, thus fueling the economic strength that builds those fortunes.

Selection bias is the greatest force known to man. Things get publicized by their best case, not by their average case.

The income distribution, housing ownership, education, etc. stats for the USA would seem to disagree. The 3rd world level dilapidation surrounding rich enclaves is very specific to liberal-run cities as far as I can tell (my favorite quote from a Nob Hill condo owner - "It's only nice here because the homeless are too lazy to walk uphill").

Even super depressed places I've been to, like Spokane, WA, or rural Illinois by Kentucky border, look far more orderly, safe and well-run. Clearly you've never been to the actual 3rd world ;)

A quick google search about Spokane turned up this[1] and this[2]. Maybe the only difference between SF and Spokane is that the real estate prices means it is easier to hide the problems from public view.

Pretty much every city and state, liberal or conservative, has a fair share of population that is struggling with drug addiction, mental health issues, and poverty. The difference between SF and other areas, is we have higher real estate prices and better weather, so these issues are much more visible than else where.

[1] https://www.safewise.com/blog/most-dangerous-cities/ [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Spokane/comments/bchlna/how_ghetto_...

I guess Spokane went downhill, I've last been there several years ago and the comments also seem to say the last couple of years homeless population exploded. Still, they seem to be describing abandoned parts of a shrinking city, not the entire place. In SF it's all over (I've lived in SOMA and Inner Richmond, and worked near Union Square). I'd expect the fact that SF is swimming in money (compared to Spokane) would have an opposite effect. So I don't think it's that "every city has problems". Even the cities on the same train line as SF don't have the same problems, nor do better run cities with less money with good weather (Texas, Utah, Florida). Same deal with Seattle, quickly going downhill with increasingly progressive City Council and major, while less-progressive cities across the bridge are doing just fine; and even stereo-typically poorer cities to the North and South don't look nearly as bad.

The supreme levels of wealth is largely specific to liberal-run cities as well. Home cities of the top 10 billionaires in the U.S. are Seattle, Bay Area, Seattle, Bay Area, Omaha, Bay Area, Seattle, Bay Area, Bay Area, Bentonville. The list of metro areas by per capita income is DC, San Jose, Seattle, San Francisco, Boston.

I think you may have causality backwards: liberal policies are enacted as a way to paper over the huge income disparities that are generated by having a dominant global industry. Regional wealth and inequality cause liberal policies, liberal policies don't cause wealth & inequality.

I don't think so; the 3rd-world-like situation is limited mostly to SF, many other cities in the same area are not as progressive and doing better. Ditto for Seattle - the East Side has greater wealth, more expensive housing, is less progressive, and is doing much better. Tacoma has far less wealth, is less progressive and is doing better anyway. There's a common pattern here...

There's a grain of truth in what you say in terms of progressive policies used to "paper over" stuff - some places prevent the problem via non-progressive policies, and those stupid enough to use progressive ones are left with the 3rd world conditions in need of papering over.

I have a pet theory... I think compassion is the worst basis for policy, proven by study after study to be irrational, scope insensitive, biased in many ways. The 2nd worst basis for policy are slogans. However, most people are compassionate and are fired up by slogans, so they vote for compassionate simple policies. That predictably causes horrible results, at which point the smarter/richer people become a bit more likely to leave, and the less smart/less rich people stay, or are not able to leave financially; that causes more compassionate and slogan-based policies; rinse, repeat.

The fact that rich places also have a corresponding rise in poverty is not a new problem, and it's one people have thought about and "solved" over a 100 years ago. See Progress and Poverty [0] by Henry George, named to capture the idea that poverty often follows progress. The core idea is that as a society's productivity increases, this just gets captured by higher land values and rents, leaving labour having to pay even more rent to just survive.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_and_Poverty

The worst parts of LA, Chicago, Detroit, etc. are just as bad as the Tenderloin. The only weird thing about SF is that the office/financial district is the worst part of the city. In Chicago, a white collar worker can live their entire life without going to Englewood, but in SF, you're actually forced to see it (which is... maybe a good thing?)

> are just as bad as

And much larger than

> It depends heavily on where in the city you are.

I suspect this is the case in nearly every city in the world: some nice areas, some dirty areas, some dangerous areas, etc. What always struck me as unusual in SF is that the bad areas are finely interlaced with or even overlapping with the "nice" commercial/dining/shopping areas. It's not like "oh, avoid this dark corner of town," but instead it's like "there's some nice high-end shopping here with naked bleeding people injecting drugs literally in front of the door."

Yes! But, you can basically avoid that by avoiding Soma and the Tenderloin. There are no naked bleeding people in Dogpatch, Potrero Hill, the Sunset and Richmond, the Marina, etc. etc.

> I put up with increasing crime, dangerous grime (such as needles in bike lanes) and tent cities on sidewalks all over the place for a decade until my brain couldn't take it anymore.

But this is exactly a consequence of catering to wealthy tech: infrastructure is left to collapse while development focuses on the wealthy. Rather than addressing transportation issues, tech just built their own exclusive network. Rather than addressing cost-of-living inequity, tech just drove up real-estate prices.

It sounds to me what you really want is for someone to alleviate your discomfort by shoveling off the riff-raff so that you can enjoy your bike ride, rather than having to address the systemic issues, which might impact your net worth.

Another issue I suggest is also that systemic issues are harder to solve- I don't live in SF but I understand there is corruption, NIMBYism, and waste that takes the considerable budget SF has and doesn't actually improve lives for the neediest who live there. Tech people haven't in general been highly politically involved, but political involvement- real political involvement, the kind that go to town halls as well as protests, the kind that build communities, etc. has been dying nationwide. The whole infrastructure of holding politicians accountable is rotting out from the country.

It's your claim that it's "tech"'s job to solve these issues, rather than the city government, the people whose actual job it is to solve these issues?

Flush with extra cash from the taxes paid by "tech", to boot.

Like, what do you want here? Should "tech" appropriate a significant part of the government's job in addressing these issues? I'm sure you don't actually want that.

I agree with you, but I am also a person that just wants someone to do it. Anyone at all, really. City governments are failing fantastically in major tech hubs, I kind of just think fuck it. Let some chowderhead tech goon take a shot at solving housing/homelessness/whatever. Nobody else is going to.

That's if you can get the government out of the way. The problem isn't just that the government is doing nothing; it's that they actually block progress.

> Rather than addressing transportation issues, tech just built their own exclusive network. Rather than addressing cost-of-living inequity, tech just drove up real-estate prices.

This feels like misplaced blame? Is one expected to believe that "tech" should be doing the government's job? If anything, one could argue that tech did do its part by paying higher taxes on average </two-cents>

> It sounds to me what you really want is for someone to alleviate your discomfort by shoveling off the riff-raff so that you can enjoy your bike ride, rather than having to address the systemic issues, which might impact your net worth.

I am not seeing anything in the grandparent that suggests they are not willing to pay for cleaner streets and better housing and homeless services through taxes to a well managed city.

You are correct, I am actually asking to pay more taxes if some of these problems could be solved.

What good is having a lot of money if you're surrounded by problems and are unhappy? I would gladly spent it to make my community more egalitarian.

The problem is that in reality, paying more taxes just creates more problems.

I doubt more taxes would help. If you're in California and San Francisco, your taxes are already higher than they would be in most other places in the USA. Before I'd agree to paying even more, I'd want to know what exactly my existing taxes are paying for, and why those things are more important than cleaning up literal shit from the sidewalks.

Development always focuses on the top of the market and there is nothing wrong with that. New houses are better and cost more. Their creation depresses the price of older houses. It is exactly analogous to the car market. You can't lower the price of used cars by outlawing new cars.

It sounds like to me that you're saying that the city and surrounding governments couldn't handle the new, unruly kid on the block that is "tech", so the kid gets blamed for having bad parents? "Tech" drove up real estate prices? That's a second order effect at best.

address the systemic issues, which might impact your net worth

That's a hell of an unsupported stretch. But it is typical of the mindset: "rich people just want to stay rich, that's all want, net worth, blah, blah, blah." Look, there have to plenty of tech people like me that wonder why I'm not being taxed more to address these issues. I've got money to burn, take some of it, Local Government. (Uh, oh, here comes the jackass to suggest I voluntarily write a check to the government coffers; thanks, that was helpful.) Park some of those assumptions about people that fell into money, and maybe some solutions can be implemented together. Otherwise the alternative is to listen to the sound of our own voices.

These issues are all political issues, so I'm not sure what people expect the tech minority to do ― become even more politically powerful, and even more influential in matters of civic life? Furthermore, the wealth of tech is completely different from the voting base of tech.

This is a democratic city situated in a democratic state in a democratic country. So, like, either the people on any level want to do something or... do they want the Andrew Carnegie of tech to punch through the "red tape"?

What is the city/state/federal political mood on matters of big homeless, housing, or infrastructure projects? Isn't it depressed or pessimistic?

I would take issue with this assumption as I had moved from a pretty socialist country to SF, where I paid much higher taxes and didn't complain. Nay, I celebrated the taxes I paid because I saw where they went all around me. Fantastic infrastructure (SF roadways are littered with potholes and terrible quality), affordable housing and supported citizens.

We have a very tech heavy scene in the city I moved from where people earn 6 figures, with a much higher population and the situation on the ground was nowhere near what it was in SF.

I also take issue with your last statement because it implies I want "the poors" removed purely for my own enjoyment. I do not, I realize the suffering they go through and I want to help support them for their own sake and mine so that I don't have to see them suffer daily.

I have posed this question to other SF residents but how does allowing people to pitch tents on the sidewalk and suffer visibly help them or people just passing through? People that are not vulnerable are suffering because they're visibly seeing these people suffer. Who is winning here?

>But this is exactly a consequence of catering to wealthy tech:

It wasn't tech that passed Prop 13 and imposed permanent austerity and deflationary budgeting on California's local governments.

Most places don't do any "shoveling off the riff-raff", yet they don't have that problem. It appears that the huge per-person budget San Francisco has for homeless people is actually generating homeless people.

> Most places don't do any "shoveling off the riff-raff", yet they don't have that problem.

In most major cities on the East coast at least, this is definitely routine practice but they just hide it from you.

> I'm just disappointed to see "techies" still being blamed and called money hungry just because people are looking the other way at other problems.

If anything the problem is renters and their zoning laws...

How is the problem tenants?

The high cost of the city comes from people having money; which recently has been primarily because of the influx of us in tech.

The high cost exacerbates all those other problems! People are pushed out and have fewer opportunities.

So why not blame the money and the people who brought it?

How do you suggest the city "fix it"? What are your policy suggestions? How will you get the residents of the city on board with all of them?

The high cost comes from a city that basically makes it impossible to build housing. The bureaucracy drives out developers, leaving only those who are willing to deal with nightmarish levels of legal hurdles. The legal headaches make the housing insanely expensive to build.

Exactly. Econ 101. Lots of demand and no supply means prices rise. SF and other bay area cities are more than happy to build tons of office space for tens of thousands of office jobs, but when it comes to building the housing those new workers need to live... Nope. Office jobs mean revenue, houses mean costs. When you have to be a home owner to be on a city council, your incentives get a little perverse.

It's not some abstract "bureaucracy". It's the fact that "build nothing and make the undesirables leave SF" is the popular position on housing in San Fran. The only thing different political factions disagree about is whom to deport.

Exactly, even many "progressive" groups are okay with a situation where many people who want to live in SF won't be able to.

The difference from the status quo is that they don't think it should be the price mechanism that decides who gets to stay and who has to leave.

> dangerous grime (such as needles in bike lanes)

Is where you moved to safer to cycle in overall?

Great question, I have yet to discover the safety of the bike lanes spread around here but local cyclists I've talked to feel comfortable cycling on the semi-protected bike lanes on main roads here because they're so wide.

I admit, the fully protected bike lanes that have recently come up on Embarcadero with concrete barriers had me excited for my safety, until I had to deal with the grime and odd person jumping in the bike lane randomly (Generally mentally ill folks).

As far as biking infrastructure, if you ignore the other problems, SF has really stepped up its game, mostly due to the effort by the SF Cycling coalitions, I believe (And a number of cycling related deaths).

Cycling is inherently more dangerous than either walking or driving, no matter what.

Cycling is more dangerous in America because of bad cycling infrastructure.

Put another way, cycling is only more dangerous than driving if you consider an SUV running over a bike to be an example of cycling being the more dangerous form of transport.

No, riding around on two wheels with no protection besides a foam helmet is just obviously more risky (to the rider) than riding in a steel frame, 4-wheeled vehicle with crumple zones, air bags, and safety restraints. Even given an isolated bike infrastructure with no interaction between bikes and cars, if you hit a rock or a pedestrian or another cyclist and fall, you are going to sustain some type of injury. It takes a pretty major collision to sustain an injury in a modern automobile.

There don't appear to be great statistics on bicycle deaths per mile and by cause but what I found is in line with my contention. "Cyclists are either 3.4x or 11.5x as likely to die as motorists, per passenger mile." And that's only fatalities, not injuries.

And over 80% of cycling crashes are falls, running into fixed objects, or running into another cyclist. Collision with a moving motor vehicle is only about 11%.

https://bicycleuniverse.com/bicycle-safety-almanac/

> There don't appear to be great statistics on bicycle deaths per mile and by cause but what I found is in line with my contention. "Cyclists are either 3.4x or 11.5x as likely to die as motorists, per passenger mile." And that's only fatalities, not injuries.

That's in the US, notorious for bicycling infrastructure that varies between not-great and abysmal.

If you compare cycling fatalities per mile in Denmark or Norway with MV fatalities per mile in the US, things are approximately a wash.

Don't disagree with anything you said, but do take issue with the stat equating 1 mile of bike distance with 1 mile of automobile distance. Surely the stat should be normalized on a "per commute" basis. At the very least throw out long-haul car trips.

At least for the purposes of comparing relative safety of commuting by bike vs. car.

> (to the rider)

But this is my (maybe protracted, admittedly) point about an SUV hitting the bike: if you account for injuries to others outside the vehicle, driving becomes a more dangerous form of transportation. If you only value the lives of those in the vehicle, you're right that it's probably safer per mile.

> Cycling is inherently more dangerous than either walking or driving, no matter what.

Not necessarily more dangerous than driving. More than walking, sure, you are usually faster. But the problem tends to be more about infrastructure.

However, if you adjust for "lifestyle" diseases, cycling becomes more attractive.

When I'm driving I'm way more worried about hurting someone else then actually getting hurt myself.

When I'm on a bike it's the exact opposite.

Now maybe my perception is wrong and perhaps my perception of the absolute risk is incorrect but it sure doesn't feel that way.

I live near the Southwest Corridor bike trail in Boston. I've never seen used needles on the bike path. Homeless people camping out near the bike path? Totally. The occasional broken glass on the pavement? Unfortunately. But nothing like what is, supposedly, so typical in San Francisco.

i routinely see drug needles on the ground or junkies shooting up in Seattle too.

I've wondered if this is something the entire west coast from Vancouver to San Diego is experiencing.

For what its worth, I ride my bike to work 8 miles each way every day in SF (sunset to exploratorium) and haven't seen a needle since I stopped riding on Division St (literally under the overpass) a couple years ago. Anecdotes go both ways I guess

I visited SF late last year and it seemed pretty nice to me. Note that I live in Baltimore.

"Bhakta, a San Francisco native and tenant organizer for affordable housing nonprofit Mission Housing, is well-versed in the seismic impact that the growth of the tech industry has had on the city. As software companies expanded over the past decade, they drew thousands of well-off newcomers who bid up rents and remade the city’s economy and culture."

Those rents were by and large captured by SF "natives" who bought or inherited their properties decades ago. I've never understood why I, a transplant who needed a place to live, was blamed for high rents and not my landlords, real estate millionaires who vote against new development.

Look at this fucking map and tell me who has benefitted the most from the sky high cost of living: https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/networth/article/Intera...

>Those rents were by and large captured by SF "natives" who bought or inherited their properties decades ago. I've never understood why I, a transplant who needed a place to live, was blamed for high rents and not my landlords, real estate millionaires who vote against new development.

Because the people blaming you are the children of those homeowners and stand to inherit their property.

> I've never understood why I, a transplant who needed a place to live, was blamed for high rents and not my landlords, real estate millionaires who vote against new development.

It's always psychologically easier to blame outsiders for your problems than to look in the mirror. Especially when experts are telling you that most of the causative factors are policies you hold quite close to your heart.

Are you saying OP should blame their self?

I'm saying that people who blame recent migrants for decades of urban planning policy are possessed of the rare and wonderful opportunity to reassess how they apportion blame.

Some natives want it to be 1) affordable to live where they grew up 2) with the density (/"character") they grew up with. If more people and money come in, then one of those things must change, so they blame it on more people and money coming in.

I think they'd rather live in a SF where supply and demand were both where they were when they were kids.

From your link: "The tax on one house, which sold in 2015, is $21,400 a year. Four doors down, the tax is about $1,400 a year."

What is the equivalent of that housing tax in other countries? In Australia, I pay council rates (local roads, garbage pickup, etc) which are about $2k/year, and there would be a further tax if the property was not my primary residence. But $20k is something else again!

This is part of the cycle that makes the Bay Area wonderful. People come, people go, some people stay. In my opinion some of the most interesting work (including but not exclusively in tech) is going to happen in the next few years in the Bay Area precisely because of the opportunities and breathing space this outflow of people (and perhaps eventually money) is going to open up.

I lived in the Bay Area for 20 years, including college and 2-3 tech booms (depending how you count). From what I saw, there is always some portion of local people (like the angry anti-skyscraper guy in this article) that is too xenophobic and anti change, just as there is always some portion of newcomers that is too transactional, extractive, and ready to skip town when the going gets tough. Both postures are perfectly defensible; it's tough living in a place where rents are as unpredictable as they can be in the Bay Area, and tech leaders have not historically shown (IMO) enough commitment to the community and tax base, meanwhile those who move to the Bay Area for work are under no obligation to like it and stay, even if their complaints (about rent control, regulation, "dirty" streets, etc) are totally cliched.

Somewhere out there in the city some bleary eyed veteran of the scene is negotiating a tiny, bargain sublet for a few desks and a slice of a server closet in SoMA and will release something quietly revolutionary in the next year or so that in five years will be the next big thing. Or maybe it will be a cheery eyed newcomer leasing factory time in Hayward for a hardware thing, or someone testing robots in a warehouse in West Oakland, or whatever. Right now is one of the times when things get interesting.

This is a great comment because it recognizes that all of what's happening is cyclical. San Francisco has boomed and busted in the past, it will boom and bust again. People comparing it to Detroit seem to ignore that that city itself is in the throes of a revival. How could S.F., which even without tech is in a prime geographical location and climate, do even less?

There is a fallacy here. Yes, these things are cyclical, but rents are still not crashing to levels affordable to the working class. The bay area is getting the worst of both worlds: a crisis on the streets and, even despite recent decreases, rents unaffordable to normal working people. This is sort of unprecedented uncharted territory beyond the boom and bust cycles up until this point. The people you wrote about in the last paragraph still can't afford to get in, and it's not like there is a lot of work in, say, the restaurant industry right now to finance these side efforts.

I wouldn't be surprised if the Bay Area remains on the whole more expensive after this boom than it was before the boom started. I'm pretty sure that's how it has historically worked. I don't profess to know how far things will fall.

I will note that historically the busts take time to play out just like the booms do. Dot-com 1 burst around April 2000 but I don't think the rents fully bottomed out for nearly two years.

Anyway you're right that things don't come back ever exactly as they were before. I just think more breathing room will open up.

Intuitively this makes sense: Moving takes time. My wife and I have talked about moving almost every day since the pandemic started, but haven't done anything about it

I don’t think rents have been “affordable for the working class” in SF since before the city’s revival in the 70’s. That’s why rent control was enacted.

SF has always been an expensive city. If you look at historical data, a house was $200k back in the 1980’s, or about $650k today. So cheaper than now but nowhere close to affordable.

The rate of rent increase in San Francisco was higher before the tech boom than after.

Sure. But before the tech boom it wasn’t affordable for lower income people.

It doesn't have to be affordable to the working class, it just has to be affordable enough for a few engineers who saved up a bit in the last boom to take a ~5-year sabbatical. Then fear of falling into the struggling working class motivates them to keep inventing, while a desire to replace all the working-class employees who can no longer afford to live in the city gives them a ready-made market.

There's no guarantee that the working class as we know it today (i.e. those who perform repetitive tasks with their hands) will continue to exist. Most of the Bay Area's history has been about automating and replacing progressively higher-level portions of the economy with machines.

SF had a city budget of approx. 12B in 2019-20[1]. If there is a tech flight, who is going to pick up the tab? Some of the options I see range from unlikely to very unlikely to impossible - cut government services, increase city income tax, add a wealth tax for SF residents, incentivize the tech industry to return.

[1] https://sfbos.org/sites/default/files/FY2019-20_and_FY2020-2...

>SF had a city budget of approx. 12B in 2019-20

That is fucking bananas. Chicago has a city budget of $12 billion this year with a population almost exactly three times higher. What in the hell are they spending money on?

Shoveling enormous amounts of cash to homeless nonprofits who are incentivized to keep people homeless.

The budget was $6B in 2008. About 40% of the windfall was captured by the bureaucracy in pay and benefits. And the city also has a huge welfare-industrial complex that bristled at the audacity of former Supervisor Sean Elsbernd when he asked for accountability for the money spent. Most of the activists interviewed for the article are in fact part of that parasitic group.

Why aren't people marching on city hall about this?

What in the hell are they spending money on?

Salaries and Pension obligations. If SF was going to make one great budgetary fix it would be to move away from pensions for public employees and move to a more traditional 401k retirement funds. The amount of money the city has to continue to pay to fund pension obligations is obscene. My Mom married an ex SF firefighter. He had done his 25 years, retired around 50 and lived to 92. Full Pension for 40 years and now my Mom gets a chunk. She was his second wife and married him 25 years after he left the department. Great for her...

https://www.openthebooks.com/forbes-why-san-francisco-is-in-...

Yeah but Chicago pays for those things too, maybe even moreso. Are the SF pensions actually funded correctly?

No San Francisco is underfunded and they've been added to by Voter initiatives. They also suffer from issues where they've had to increase pension obligations as the Cost of Living has increased at a greater rate than elsewhere.

A few years old... https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2017/07/11/san...

That's the pensions. SF public salaries are also likely 50 to 100% higher than in Chicago.

No they (Chicago) are not paying for them. They have the obligations, but they are underfunded. That's their big problem.

Since SF is also a county, aren't they also carrying county level costs (multiplied by the high COL factor too).

Chicago is also bankrupt like the entire state of Illinois.

> Chicago has a city budget of $12 billion this year with a population almost exactly three times higher. What in the hell are they spending money on?

1) San Francisco has a unified city-county government. The combined Chicago-Cook County budget is ~$20 billion.

2) San Francisco's budget includes both its public transportation agency (SFMTA) as well as its international airport (SFO). I'm not sure about Chicago, but I think Chicago's budget includes its two airports (ORD, MDW), but not CTA. Cook County's budget doesn't seem to include CTA, either. Airports generally pay for themselves (at least these 3 seem to), so they inflate headline budget numbers but are otherwise irrelevant. However, public transportation (including in SF) is usually a significant net cost.

3) The cost of living in San Francisco is much higher and therefore government pay scales in San Francisco are some of the highest in the country. Of course, many people choose to live far outside the city, but the pay still needs to compensate for the commute.

OTOH, San Francisco's budget DOES NOT include its K-12 public school system. (AFAIU, all school systems in California are separate entities principally funded by the state.) Chicago's budget DOES seem to include its K-12 public schools.

Fortunately, many of San Fransisco's discretionary expenditures are elastic, both due to their nature (e.g. homeless outreach) as well as SF's comparatively good public union relations. Next year's budget was scaled back by $1.2 billion ($13.6 -> $12.4).

Chicago's CTA is I believe part of the RTA, which also operates the suburban mass transit (Metra trains, and Pace buses). This spans Cook and the surrounding counties and some of the trains even run into neighboring states (Indiana, Wisconsin).

The speaker of the house lives in SF. If there is a federal bailout of state and local governments, San Francisco will likely be first in line.

They will be fine considering Los Angeles makes 10.5B function across 5x the population and 10x the land area.

I have a feeling that post covid any outflows from SF will be replaced by a pretty rapid inflow of new people trying to get in while its more "affordable"

Get a new, rent-controlled place now - you'll never have a better opportunity.

Indeed. This effect is delayed during quarantine since so many of the things that make cities great are on hold. Once museums and restaurants reopen, live music returns, and people start throwing parties, folks holing up in Tracy are going to start feeling some serious FOMO and peer pressure, and discounted rent will complete the irresistible offer.

It depends on where WFH policies of all the tech companies end up.

Elberling...is among those who believe the city was being overrun by people who arrived for one reason.

“The motivation got to this get-rich-quick attitude,” he said. “And that isn’t what our city is about."

It's what your city has been about for over 170 years. Your fucking football team is named for this very idea.[0][1]

Now, that's not to say I'm not sympathetic. Even in the less-expensive Seattle area I wonder where my hair dresser is supposed to live (I know where she lives: nowhere near Redmond). I'm trying to think of anyone I know that lives within the boundaries of "Eastside" (...of Seattle) that doesn't work in software and isn't married to same. I came up with one person: a psychologist. IOW, I have drifted from my modest roots and now only know high-income people. That's fine, I guess, but boy howdy, I'll bet I've grown far more out-of-touch and more bubbled than I'd like to think.

But I see a lot of what I perceive to be jealousy amongst the noble concern for those less well off. Are you blocking those "new, expensive condos" because of concern for the poor or because you don't think wealthy people should have a place to live in SF? (Okay, fine, they can consume all of the cheap housing, and...oh, this has been rehashed ad nauseam.) I don't even have a snappy question for those that block corporate busses, y'all are just "doing something" for the sake of doing so (and the 'gram points, I imagine). But mostly I see a lot of "I was here first" attitude, like that counts for something. As if one gets to define "what our city is about", even if one gets it horribly wrong from the start.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_49ers

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush#Forty-nin...

Seattle also has international shipping, multiple Universities, and, at least for now, Boeing. Being a software town rounds out the demographics, instead of dominating them.

A lot of midwestern towns have faded away because they were single industry towns. I can sympathize with people who don't want their city to be beholden to one group of people, who might disappear at any moment, after having extracted what they want from the city.

Sure, but being an industry town is largely a consequence of city policy. Specifically, policy which makes it too expensive to live in the city unless you're part of that dominant industry.

It's "Dutch Disease"[1] from a different angle.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease

The Tech industry is not really a single industry, though. There is medical tech and media tech and manufacturing tech and more. Many of these fields hardly touch each other and have jargon that is unintelligible to the others. Major changes in the economy could flush entire sectors and leave the rest humming away. In a way the current pandemic has underscored the resilience of tech's economic sprawl.

I don’t know why it’s so difficult to accept that cities change, often for the worse. The quality of life for the average person in SF was unquestionably better ~30 years ago than it is today. At this point, is it even possible to have a middle class existence in SF?

Your post seems to contradict itself. If it's not possible to have a middle class existence in SF, then surely it's even less possible to have a working class or poor existence in SF. Therefore, since the city is now exclusively populated by rich people, wouldn't the average person be rich, and therefore have a better quality of life than the average middle class person ~30 years ago?

Is this a serious reply? The real world isn’t a logic problem.

SF today is mostly inhabited by two groups: the rich and the working poor. The rich can afford to live wherever they like and take Ubers or corporate shuttles. The working poor commute in on decaying, often dangerous public transit from an hour or more away.

Of course it's serious, and you just confirmed it: SF is not "inhabited" by the working poor at all, who are forced to live elsewhere. Unless you're talking about the tent cities, I guess. If you can actually afford to live in SF proper, I bet your quality of life is excellent.

You are conflating “average person in the country”, aka middle class, with “average person that lives in a specific area.”

This is not particularly complicated.

What? I'm not conflating anything. I'm talking about "the average person in SF", exactly as you described in your OP. You can talk about the average person in the country all you want, but this person does not live in SF.

I'll stop replying since it seems like we are talking past each other, and I'm attempting to read your posts charitably but I just don't get it.

Tell that to the recent college graduates splitting a dilapidated Victorian with 4 roommates for $1800/mo.

> If it's not possible to have a middle class existence in SF, then surely it's even less possible to have a working class or poor existence in SF

That's a fallacious conclusion. It is very much possible to have a poor existence if there's no reasonable path to middle class. For example, you don't pay rent if you live in a tent city, and tent cities are very much a reality in SF.

Lots of people live in cheap rent controlled housing though. They can take low paying jobs and still make ends meet so they drive wages down.

The city requires housing producers to sell a percentage of their output to low-income buyers at a government-set price. So middle-class housing buyers pay significantly more to cover that cost.

It’s funny because Eberling is a rich developer living mostly in Marin who makes his money renting out expensive apartments built with city subsidies.

I think this is a really good point about people moving to San Francisco to get rich for a long time now. And not just SF; my grandparents immigrated to New York with nothing, worked hard to establish themselves, and eventually moved out to raise a family. They had a "transactional" relationship with the city, but I like to think that New York was also enriched by their presence. And I think when we look back at all the people who have come through San Francisco on their journey to a better life, we'll realize that the city has been serving a very important function.

That's not to say that San Francisco doesn't have problems - it most certainly does. But I think that this "us vs. them" mentality is counter productive when it comes to actually solving the city's problems.

Funny that there's not a single mention in the article about natives and long-time locals who have constantly voted against new construction or any progressive housing measure, which is the root cause of the crisis to begin with. No mention also of all the corruption/bribery scandals which city hall is currently involved in. Nor large landlords who can choose to rent out their apartment to whoever they want at whatever price they want. Nope, it's always young techies that are the problem since they are the easiest target.

I think these advocates will find that even after all these tech companies have taken flight the city's problems will still remain, perhaps worse than before due to the loss of the massive tax base.

> Funny that there's not a single mention in the article about natives and long-time locals who have constantly voted against new construction or any progressive housing measure, which is the root cause of the crisis to begin with

Not only is there political opposition to housing that the article omits, but the two quoted “affordable housing advocates” (Chirag Bhakta and John Elberling) themselves demonize privately constructed housing and are complicit in exacerbating the housing shortage. Though to be fair, they have their own theories of how they think new housing causes gentrification, and they typically try to encumber developers with low-income housing requirements and other community benefits rather than opposing new housing for the sake of benefiting incumbent landlords.

In particular, John Elberling has been the biggest proponent of increasing low-income housing requirements in new construction up to the point where apartment buildings are expected to be only marginally feasible (https://sfcontroller.org/inclusionary-housing-technical-advi...), and he dismisses the effect that this would have on preventing new housing. He also opposed with farcical arguments statewide upzoning that would have allowed more construction in wealthy neighborhoods (opposed SB 827 https://www.facebook.com/TODCOgroup/posts/435262493564720 and opposed SB 50 https://48hills.org/2019/12/supes-to-vote-on-wieners-develop...).

It always amazes me that people get offended by this stuff. There's so much money in SF that tech people are actually small fry. Tech money buys surprisingly little political influence because the government, unions, construction are all very powerful. Your company got sold for $100 million? Big deal, you are a flea before the power that Rome Aloise (who you have never heard of) wields, let alone the real big fish.

You know that odd feeling of unfairness and powerlessness? That's what it's like to be an immigrant subject to capricious laws. Now that's you because you are an insect before the San Francisco Political Machine. This is what it means to have all the incentives shaped against you.

And you can grumble on the Internet but it'll do nothing. Because it is unfair. It is disingenuous. It is propaganda. But that's politics.

I was thinking that tech companies are in the San Francisco area because that's where a lot of tech talent is found, and tech talent is found there because tech companies are there.

Is there anything more to it than that?

I'm happy to see tech spread out a bit. The absurd housing prices in San Francisco aren't healthy for either the tech companies nor the non-tech neighbors.

A buddy of mine years ago did a sports-coaching related start-up in Washington, DC. It was a cool idea targeted at high school and college football teams.

He wanted to stay in DC, and had the talent he wanted there. His app was high-quality, and he ended up getting an investment from a VC. The VC was based in SF. My buddy didn't want to move there, but the VC made the investment contingent on him relocating to SF, because that's where the VC lived.

He made the move. He immediately noticed that he had to pay far more for people who weren't any more productive or talented than what he had in DC. His biggest gripe was that the turnover was a lot higher, and he was often getting people who seemed to have lower aptitude for their roles.

Apparently, VC's requiring relocation to SF is a common thing, and I suspect that it's part of the reason so much is concentrated there.

So now I'm wondering if there are a lot of VCs because there are a lot of tech companies.

It's one more thing that seems to compound the feedback loop.

It's the universities.

Here [0] is a post that discusses some of the reasons why Silicon Valley became a high tech hub.

[0] https://yarchive.net/comp/startups.html

the tech population has always been blamed for housing or lack there of...after this flight, when homes and apartments become available, watch them stay empty even with reduced rent. why? because those who have always wanted more 'housing' could never afford it anyways.

if there are no jobs for 'techies', there wont be any jobs for the second tier in the service sector economy. they cant afford to live in the housing they wanted build. what they have always wanted was affordable cheap housing in the most expensive cities of the usa.

it was always the govt and their out of control budgets and unfunded pension liabilities. and feel good vote bank pacifying budget. blaming tech was a convinient distraction. because its easy to rouse the mob to go and lynch someone else instead of submitting to a forensic audit or a rip out transparent budget analysis.

that..some might say...is not only unreasonable and unacceptable, but also impossible. some econ 101 has to play out in real life so that when the post orgasmic bliss after the outrage porn ebbs away, economic and fiscal reality can float up where the sun shines. because. free market forces.

I haven't lived in SF but I work in tech and have been visiting for 10 years.

My hot take is that NYC (where I have lived) is better in every way except for the weather. Every time I arrived at SFO and walked outside I was like "why don't I live here?". Then I get to the tent cities, the grime, the open drug use and the hordes of homeless and I'm like "oh yeah, that's why". And that's before you get to the sky-high cost of living.

Given the zoning and building constraints in the Bay Area, IMHO the big tech companies were over-capacity for how many workers that whole area can support. Fixing the zoning and required infrastructure to support more people is not something that will change overnight either (or ever, potentially).

So the pandemic has shepherded in what might be the turning point for this unsustainable growth: and that is permanent remote work.

Let me put it this way: I used to say that everyone (who worked at Google) lives in the Bay Area to work at Google whereas people work at Google everywhere else to live in those places. This isn't strictly true of course but generally I think it is.

I see this move as being a boon for a lot of cities in the US: Atlanta, Dallas, Austin and Denver spring to mind. And this likely has long-term political consequences. Georgia flipped blue (just) in the election just gone largely due to Atlanta's growth. I think Texas will flip blue within 10-15 years.

SF could be a nice place to live but it isn't. That was largely due to there being too many people who had to live there. This won't change overnight either but I see alleviating that "need" to live in the Bay Area as being a net positive.

Studies show that transplants from blue states moving to Texas actually voted red at a higher rate than those born in TX. Keep in mind that there are millions of right-leaning individuals in populated coastal areas (much more than many red states combined) and of the pool of people considering moving they are often the most motivated. The rate may be different for those moving to states other than TX though.

https://www.texaspolicy.com/will-texas-flip-because-of-blue-...

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2018/11/09/native-t...

https://www.thecentersquare.com/texas/gov-abbott-new-texas-v...

In 2000 in a close election, Bush 43 carried Texas by >21 [1].

This year in a pretty comfortable Biden win, Trump carried Texas by a mere ~5.5.

In 2018, Ted Cruz as the incumbent retained his Senate seat against Beto O'Rourke by a mere 2 points [2].

You raise a good point about the study of voting patterns of Texas transplants but whatever the cause I think it's clear that in the long term Texas is trending blue.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidentia...

[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/texas-senate

In a similar vein, my home-city was vying hard to get the Amazon HQ2 to be located in it. The bid was a longshot to begin with, but I was so relieved when Amazon chose not to come to DFW. Sure, I know it would have been great for "The Economy" but terrible for the average Joe and Jane just trying to get a middle class life established here.

I felt exactly the same when Amazon passed over my home city

I think you're making a big mistake by buying into the argument that a big new employer moving in drives up demand for housing, and therefore it will immediately be a disaster for the community.

The reason this argument is flawed is that it's ignoring the supply side of the equation.

SV, and especially SF, have numerous restrictions and NIMBY empowerment issues that dramatically constrain the ability to add new supply to the housing market. It's incredibly difficult and expensive to build new housing there. Likewise for Seattle. The local activists tend to ignore this supply constraint, and attack the easy target of the big, evil tech companies and their rather easy to pick-on "yuppie, hipster" employees, acting as if demand for new housing is inherently bad for the region.

It's an incredibly myopic, and frankly, greedy, view of the world. "My city was perfect as soon as the dwelling I live in was created, and nothing else should be added after that."

DFW doesn't have the same constraints on new development that SV, SF, Seattle have. You wouldn't see a huge spike in housing costs like you had in those locations.

People in DFW love their single family homes. Like most everywhere else in America: if your policy suggestion is "give up a lot of space and turn your residential neighbourhood into multi-family housing," you're going to get a lot of resistance.

It's not so land locked, which has delayed things since people can expand out, but look at what traffic is doing as a result! It'll keep sprawling, and costs will keep going up in the more central areas, though not as fast for sure.

Is it better to have growth spread to places that aren't in a not-geographically-bottlenecked-already-full area? Sure, probably. Seems a lot more sustainable and a lot less just a boon to existing lucky landholders. But then your policy solution goes back to "close SF and the other places that are full to push the growth elsewhere," not some sort of "just manage SF's growth better!" wishful thinking.

It's an incredibly myopic, and frankly, greedy, view of the world.

What's greedy is thinking that one has any right whatsoever to the land and community that other people have invested decades of their lives to build. Democracy is and should be run by the people who actually live in an area, not by literal invaders who want to take it away.

The place to apply leverage on the housing problem is on the employers and investors who are forcing concentration of industries in one tiny area. There are plenty of places in the US with plenty of land and a willingness to build.

"Literal invaders"...... wow.

So where do you live exactly? Were you born there? If not, how old were you when you "invaded" it? Because somebody lived there before you, right? How cruel of you to take their house from them.

I wasn't aware of the fact that if I own a piece of land adjacent to my house, and then choose to legally sell it to another party, who then pays taxes to the local government to fund the externalities of their presence (traffic, water, electricity, schools), that it's an "invasion".

Cities either grow or die. There is nobody in Detroit complaining about gentrifiers "invading" their neighborhood. Instead, they are desperately trying to maintain the infrastructure and find money for schools as their city has lost population over the years. I grew up in a rural county with a declining population. The elementary and middle schools I attended have been shuttered. The only hospital in the county has closed, forcing the locals to drive an hour to get to one in a neighboring county. The young all leave and never return, because there's no jobs, leaving their parents to never see grandkids except on holidays. That's the alternative to growth. If you can find a city in the US with absolutely no growth or decline in the population, and a strong economy, please let me know.

A city that fights development and growth will just push the poor out quicker, as older houses that they could have afforded are snapped up and remodeled by rich folks who otherwise would have built a brand new home.

What else do you call it when a bunch of people who don't live somewhere think they know better than the people who do?

I grew up in a semi-rural area with an exploding population. When one farmer retires and builds a neighborhood that's not that different from the existing houses, it's not a big deal. When a property developer wants to steamroll the city's zoning and put 200 apartments sharing a fence with people who've maintained the community and lived for decades with 1 or 2 neighbors, that is a big deal. When a bunch of people from out of state decide they know what a random city should look like (ahem, strongtowns), that's colonialism.

This, folks, is the root of so many problems.

> When a property developer wants to steamroll the city's zoning and put 200 apartments sharing a fence with people who've maintained the community and lived for decades with 1 or 2 neighbors, that is a big deal.

You and your neighbors own the land you have purchased. Nothing more. You don't get to dictate what others can or cannot do on land that doesn't belong to you. If someone wants to build 200 apartments, it's likely that there is expected demand for those 200 apartments. That's 200 families. So what if they are going to share a fence with you. Buy a bigger plot of land to create a buffer then.

Places change and evolve. You can try to delay things as much as you want, but it's only that, a delay. And ultimately, not up to you.

HN loves to talk about uncosted externalities, except when those externalities are imposed on someone they don't like. Drastic changes to the character of a place are an enormous burden on the people who made the place desirable in the first place. If not for the existing residents paying taxes to build infrastructure, there wouldn't be land worth developing.

What I love about these arguments is how arbitrary they are as to when the location has reached it's pinnacle of awesomeness and should be frozen in time from then on.

"Manhattan was once a Dutch colony. Those horrible gentrifiers in Harlem need to get the fuck out, now! Harlem is for the Dutch! Colonialism!!!"

The lack of self-awareness is thoroughly amusing. Racist white people in city centers could have made the exact same complaint as their neighborhoods gradually shifted to more and more minority occupants. At the end of the day, your just Daniel Day Lewis in Gangs of New York. "Keep the invading hordes out! This is OUR land!"

The lack of self-awareness is thoroughly amusing.

The feeling is mutual, I assure you.

I've lived in suburbs, city centers, rural areas, deserts, inland, coastal. I put my money where my mouth is and rented in high density new builds in downtown SF for 3 years. It was utter crap. There's no community, no shared story, and literal crap on the streets. I've also seen what happens when urbanites move out to the country; they don't know how to respect the space of others. They build monuments to anti-Native American racism right up to the edge of their property line, when they have 10 acres they could have used to gap out like everyone else.

The ethos of a place is provided by the people who've lived there for a long time. That ethos can only be preserved when growth is carefully considered, and doesn't screw over the people who've cooperated for a very long time to make the place what it is.

>There is nobody in Detroit complaining about gentrifiers "invading" their neighborhood.

There most definitely are people in Detroit who are complaining about gentrification despite the fact that the vast majority of the city isn't gentrified at all.

This is a great NIMBY argument. “There are people who would benefit highly from Amazon moving here and creating new jobs, but i like DFW the way it is now, so screw those people”

I have worked remotely for more than 10 years and I hate big cities.

I lived in Palo Alto once; never again. There are so many great places and small towns in the US that could use an influx of money and energy. These places are beautiful and housing is cheap.

Tech needs to spread the wealth by moving to small towns.

Small towns have been suffering from reduced wages (and therefore reduced tax revenue) and a brain drain to cities for decades.

Join the local city council and help improve the small town you moved to.

I moved to a small-medium city in a more rural part of the US, from SF, about 6 months ago. It truly is beautiful from a nature perspective but the car-forward culture and lack of diversity makes it difficult to imagine living here long-term. My non-white partner has no community here and we as a mixed-race couple have gotten a few "looks". It's hard to help improve an area where you feel unwanted and out of place.

Reading some old Kerouac or hardboiled novels, it’s hard to believe that it’s even the same city. Even Manhattan hasn’t changed as much in comparison.

Is that inherently a bad thing?

When it becomes impossible for artists, writers, and other culture creators to live in a city, I’d say yes. SF used to be an amazing haven for weirdos that shaped American art and culture. That’s all gone now.

There are plenty of weirdos shaping American culture living in San Francisco today, just better monetized.

100% agree, cities should prioritize building enough housing to keep it affordable. I don't think cities should prioritize maintaining the density or "character" of a city, which is how I had interpreted the original comment about old Kerouac or hardboiled novels.

Cities should be complete. A complete city means you are able to have rich people living along side working people. Cities need to be complete to be truly green, because in this case the working class are commuting within their neighborhood to work, perhaps even walking or biking, not three hours across town in the cheapest car they can afford.

> When Chirag Bhakta saw a headline recently that said tech workers were fleeing San Francisco, he had a quick reaction: “Good riddance.”

> “They used their capital to radically shift the makeup of poor, working-class communities,”

Tech people are not working class?

Generally considered to be professional class.

Working class generally refers to jobs that require little experience/education to enter since skills can be learned on the job.

Professional class generally requires higher education.

Weird mix of sugarcoating and needlessly dividing people. Not you, but the terms.

Not at all. It's the difference between an AWS employee and an Amazon fulfillment employee.

If you actually think that the two positions are at all comparable, I suggest you do a stint working in a warehouse for some perspective.

If you get paid in stock options or RSU's, by definition, you are not working-class. You are receiving an ownership stake in the enterprise.

> Tech people are not working class?

In traditional class terminology, rooted largely in the Marxist analysis of relations in capitalism, “Tech people” are mostly part of the distinct knowledge-worker subgroup of the working class (“proletarian intelligentsia”) though, because of the high pay and other aspects of the field, many have escaped to the middle class (as part of the “petit bourgeois intelligentsia”), and a very few (typically tech founders turned unicorn CxO) have entered into the upper class (“haut bourgeoisie”).

Modern American terminology has little consistent theoretical or empirical grounding, but typically reserves “working class” for the below-median-income segment of classic working class, calls most of the rest of the classic working class “middle class”, and calls approximately the classic middle class “upper middle class” or part of the “upper class”.

Are there any that are going to move into SF? I am planning on doing so after quarantine since rents will be lower but big tech compensation appears to be the same.

Some peers of mine are considering hopping back in soon to lock-in a lower rate before things get back to normal.

so where are people moving and why?

It has always been the preference of the "progressive" (Peskin) wing of SF conservatives to halt population growth by crashing the economy. People who inherit giant Mexican land grant fortunes attend Little Ivies back east, come to SF and become "tenants' rights activists" and spend their lives vilifying people who ride buses to work for a paycheck as "gentrifiers". These people are now psyched that they don't have to share the city with people who have jobs.

Could you put this in less loaded terms? I'm having trouble discerning what your actual point is, besides acrimony.

No, I don't think I can. The terms aren't loaded, they are descriptive. Elected officials in SF really are wealthy heirs with East Coast educations, vestigial Mexican land grants, and they really do describe themselves as tenants rights activists and they really do describe us as gentrifying techie scum and their plan of record really is to block all solutions to SF's housing crisis and wait for a recession.

Well, then, citation needed regarding "wealthy heirs with East Coast educations, [and] vestigial Mexican land grants, ...[whose] plan of record really is to block all solutions to SF's housing crisis and wait for a recession," And, are you willing to even consider the possibility that people in the tech industry actually are "gentrifying techie scum," or, some significantly less loaded version of that?

It's pretty indisputable that the tech industry has raised housing prices in the Bay Area, mostly because Silicon Valley is no longer a gigantic orchard. Basic economics says that when you take land and put it to a more productive use, as measured by how much money one can make using said land for said new purpose, the price of the land + improvements goes up. That's literally what's happening, and people are being forced out because of it. That's the actual definition of "gentrification." "Scum" is just a pejorative qualifier that would be used by those who don't approve of this dynamic, which, while it displays an ignorance of basic economic principles, is entirely understandable in terms of human psychology.

And, it seems utterly stupid for these people to want to crash the local economy, just to get rid of the most productive sector of the economy. Unless there's some other master plan you're not elucidating, and, for which you'd need to provide an actual citation, Occam's Razor says this is absolutely absurd.

Do you see where I'm going with this? The scenario you posit, in the terms you describe it, makes city leadership sound like a bunch of literal cartoon villains. While I don't believe they are immune from self interest, and the influence of money in politics, chasing that money away deliberately just doesn't fit in with the simpler "follow the money" scenario, unless there's something more to it than you're alleging.

Edit: moved the bit about SF leadership being deliberately obstructionist to the correct quote.

People who need housing are not gentrifiers just because they can afford it. The real gentrifiers are the people who 1) own land and 2) use the powers of government to prevent competition in the housing market. People like self-labelled socialist millionaire and tenants' rights activist Dean Preston. Let's count the ways the man fits my model:

* Inherited fortune: check; also married into separate fortune.

* Little Ivy education: check, Bowdoin

* Is an elected official: check, Supervisor of District 5

* Blocks housing: check; has voted or acted against every project in SF for entire elected career.

* Is actual gentrifier: check; used family fortune to buy existing Alamo Square mansion and the local working-class bar/venue Cafe Du Nord, Swedish American Hall.

* Has never had a job: check

* Is obscenely rich by socialist standards: check; aside from SF holdings owns many rural properties including 1 and 2.

1: https://www.landsofamerica.com/property/9241-Lone-Tree-Ridge...

2: https://www.landsofamerica.com/property/567-acres-in-Mendoci...

Okay, I might believe you if most of what you said weren't either factually incorrect, or misleading. Let's break it down point by point:

* Inherited fortune - Questionable. All I was able to find on his family was that they were Holocaust survivors. Let's just say I'll give you that one provisionally, but I'd like to see actual evidence, if you have any.

* Bowdoin - Correct.

* Is elected official - Obviously.

* Blocks housing - Does this sound like "blocking housing" to you:

> Preston also introduced two ballot initiatives approved by voters in the election. Proposition I raised the transfer tax rate for property sales valued over $10 million, intended to fund affordable housing. Proposition K authorizes the city of San Francisco to build or acquire up to 10,000 units of affordable housing.[21]" [0]

Sorry, does not pass the smell test.

Moreover, "acting against" something is not even close to "blocking" that thing. You're redefining terms to fit your preconceived narrative. It's almost as if you have a personal reason to hate him. [1]

* Gentrifier - Again, no, you do not get to redefine the term "gentrifier." If you think that's acceptable, then I can just redefine the issue out of existence, too. Sorry.

* Never had a job: Incorrect per his LinkedIn profile. [2] As well, "Preston worked for a nonprofit called the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, where he fought evictions and did advocacy for tenant rights." [1]

* Is obscenely rich by socialist standards: So, wait, now we're redefining "rich" in terms of "socialist standards?" No. Sure, he has a home in Alamo Square, which has a median home value of over $1M, and, if we accept without any actual evidence that he owns those other two properties you say he does, that puts the value of his assets at least at around $3M. But, we have no idea how much debt he has, so, his net worth could be rather pedestrian given he's an attorney in San Francisco.

Sorry, not buying it.

So, 4 out of your 7 bullet points are either factually incorrect, misleading, or completely unproven, and you expect me to believe you? Methinks thou dost protest too much. This just sounds like you have some personal axe to grind, which is completely irrelevant to whatever semblance of an argument you're trying to make. Did someone call you a gentrifier in the past, or something?

If you could bring something that vaguely resembles a coherent set of facts, then I'll believe you.

---

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Preston#Political_career

[1]: https://48hills.org/2020/10/the-sleaze-reaches-high-tide-in-...

[2]: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dean-preston-6454137/

Most of these accusations of Dean are verifiable by people who understand San Francisco politics.

1. Wealth: Dean lives in a multimillion dollar mansion on Alamo Square that he bought for $1m in 1999. He has no loan on the property as covered in his candidate disclosures: https://public.netfile.com/pub/GetDocument.aspx?ref=7907215a...

And THC does not pay its attorneys nearly enough (just cracking 6 figures in 2020) for that kind of wealth: https://nonprofitlight.com/ca/san-francisco/tenderloin-housi...

I can find references for his Sonoma estate later, but his parents were wealthy New York merchants: https://www.nytimes.com/1962/02/12/archives/linda-rothchild-...

In general, when you have an entire family of social workers who attended elite East Coast private school for the first 22 years of their lives living mortgage-free in multimillion dollar homes, you should assume generational wealth: https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/nytimes/obituary.aspx?n=le....

It’s funny that this information doesn’t make it into the Wikipedia page.

2. Blocks housing: Prop I was opposed by the city economist because it was effectively a per-unit tax on new apartment development. Most apartments are developed and operated by separate entities, and it is common for developers to sell constructed developments to apartment operators. IIRC, the estimate was an over $30k/door tax on new apartment construction on top of the existing impact fees. Very few transactions over $10m are purely speculative or for cash flow (it’s too lucrative to just hold with Prop 13); most involve some development objective. The estimate was a 20% annual reduction in apartment construction annually (https://yimbyaction.org/endorsements/san-francisco/).

Prop K is a canard — it’s not even clear the city as met the quota allowed from the previous Article 34 authorization in the 90s. The primary reason there’s no public housing in San Francisco is funding, not voter authorization. It does look good to low-information outsiders, I admit.

Dean is famous for “blocking housing” in indirect ways. He advocates for inclusionary zoning at percentages where a project will never be financially viable without outside subsidy, like the Divisadero gas station project. In power, he blocks projects directly (https://socketsite.com/archives/2020/06/impact-of-modern-inf...) or through the addition of expensive, capricious delays (https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/supervisor-seeks-to-pause-hu...).

3. Never had a job: I think it’s common for this kind of pejorative to mean “only worked for employers who are not incentivized to perform” (i.e. public / non-profit sector), not literally “never earned wage income.” Certainly applies to Dean.

SF has had generations of this type of politician. I can't count the number of times I've seen the phrase "fighting for real change". Finally on Preston's flyer I tore the "for" out.

San Francisco politicos have plenty of wealth and will not be negatively impacted by the loss of city revenue and jobs that an economic downturn implies. Here is Aaron Peskin, sitting supervisor living in a home bought for him by his parents at fire sale prices due to his own interference with the prior owner/developer, saying he wishes the air be let out of the tech economy, seemingly unaware that it is the low income service workers who have the most to lose: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/09/technology/in-san-francis...

I'm glad I never moved there.

I lived in the Bay Area for about a decade before moving away to be closer to family a few years ago. I have zero regrets for the time I spent there. I met a lot of great people. It was a great place to start out in my career because of the abundant job opportunities. The weather was fantastic.

Of course SF is not to everyone's taste, and maybe you are indeed better off for never having lived there. But for all of its recent problems, there were good reasons that people continued to move there in droves. And I am thinking this current shake up will be a good thing for the city, relieving some of the pressure on the housing market and opening up new opportunities for people.

surprisingly rich article. i got a lot out of it.

Care to summarize what you've learned?

the article is short enough that it's just better to read it.

I did read it, I just didn't find it nearly as insightful as you it seems so I'm curious what it is you learned from it.

So tech folks came in looking to get rich quick, creating huge wealth disparities which helped fuel the homeless problem and the associated social issues, but now that they can all work from home and is complaining that SF is now "a dump" they all picked up and left. Sounds about right.

How do wealth disparities contribute to the homeless problem? Is your theory that the homeless in San Fransisco are primarily displaced residents who previously were paying for local housing?

Are you seriously asking how expanding wealth disparity contributes to homelessness?

Does rent increasing across the entirety of the bay area (which increasingly only techies can afford) not contribute to poorer people getting kicked out and become homeless?

Are you seriously saying that new consumers have control over the production of housing supply?

This comment is so stupid I'm kind of amazed.

Don't get so defensive techbro. Remember, if you don't like it here anymore just move away.

Then you can do what the other techbros do on this board, boast about their new five acre forest house and shiny new Tesla, then post pics from their window showing off the view.

Nice ad hominem attack and ignoring my statement.

I’ll humor you. I own neither a Tesla nor a house. I rent. I’ve lived in sf going on almost 22 years.

Where did I say I didn’t like living here?

The two of you both broke the site guidelines badly in this thread. Please avoid nasty comments, tit-for-tat spats, and flamewars generally when posting here. We're trying for something quite different on this site, and the path to deterioration is all too easy.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Understood. Will avoid similar idiotic behavior in the future.

Thanks for the warning.

Appreciated!

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: I'm dismayed to see that you've been making a habit of posting like this. That's seriously not cool! If you keep it up we're going to have to ban you. I don't want to ban you, so would you please take the guidelines and the intended spirit of the site to heart? We want thoughtful, curious conversation here, and that can only exist when people respect each other.

So people came in looking to get rich quick, killed all the indians by scalping them and from disease, the largest land migration in world history..... (1840s). Sounds about right.

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