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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Also don't forget the role of economic growth & opportunity. America is a country where millions of immigrants have put aside their cultural differences for the pursuit of money.

Note that in areas where there is still a reasonable chance of getting rich - coastal California, for example, or NYC - people are still willing to put aside their differences to get rich. At least among the people who are actually getting rich. Chinatown or the Sunset in SF have all sorts of AAPI hate crimes, while 50 miles south in Cupertino, Chinese, Indians, and white people work side-by-side in cube farms while enjoying their Apple stock.

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Economic mobility is highest in the Mountain West region, not coastal California or NYC.

https://www.businessinsider.com/income-inequality-upward-mob...

That has nothing to do with the policies of the region, and everything to do with the volume of taxing oil operations work that requires limited/no education and can pay 6 figures.

That largely comes down to out-of-control housing cost, which does owe to policy. Can't move up if you can't move in to where the economic growth is.

One of the motivation behind NIMBY is to maintain high property values and most of all keep out multi family housing in order to price out the lower classes. This results in huge differences in k-12 educational quality and thus opportunity, due to school zoning.

You're mischaracterizing typical NIMBY motivations. When I talk to those people they are mostly long term residents who are more concerned with quality of life issues like noise and traffic. They don't care as much about property values because they aren't planning to sell; they expect to die in their current homes. And they oppose new development even in cases where it would increase their own property values.

Economic mobility is not the be-all and end-all of statistics: in particular, if everyone's income exactly doubles (and prices stay the same), then during that interval (the doubling) there was zero economic mobility.

"Note that in areas where there is still a reasonable chance of getting rich - coastal California, for example, or NYC..."

Where are these opportunities? Do people actually think they can get rich and then achieve it in any meaningful numbers?

>Where are these opportunities

If the stats on where most immigrants from foreign countries wind up residing are any indication, not in coastal California or NYC.

The people who move to SV or NYC to get rich on tech or finance are generally Americans born to parents who are college educated or credentialed professionals, and you can see this in the demographics of the companies where these people are working and getting rich.

Silicon Valley tech companies as a whole are 71% foreign-born [1]. Cupertino itself is 57.4% foreign-born [2]. I've been on teams at Google where I was the only U.S. citizen, out of 10 (the others were from Iceland, the UK, Vietnam, Taiwan, 2 India, and 3 China). Canada is another big contributor as well - out of my immediate neighborhood of ~60 coworkers, 5 were Canadian.

The largest groups within SV tech are actually green-card holders or naturalized citizens. H-1Bs are only about 8%, U.S. citizens about 20-50% depending on company.

[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/01/17/h-1b-foreign-citizens...

[2] https://datausa.io/profile/geo/cupertino-ca/

I was on a team on the east coast (finance arena) that was similar. I think a couple were US citizens, but I was the only US born person on the team. I was also the only white person on the team.

The AAPI hate crimes are not white-on-Asian, btw. In California, there generally isn’t much tension between the two groups

There isn't any tension between the black people and asian populations either. There isn't even much overlap between the two populations. People are trying to push a narrative that one riot in LA and one event in Crown Heights, both 30 years ago, are representative of a continent wide consensus, validated by individuals committing crimes now. Silly. Its so silly that it pretty much shows how segregated the two groups are.

>There isn't any tension between the black people and asian populations either

>one event in Crown Heights, both 30 years ago

I thought (I just googled it to check) that was West Indians and Lubavitch Hasidim. Which are you calling Asians?

hmmmmm ......... so even less race based animosity to point to between the aforementioned groups

I don't know, were you reasoning about California based on NY, or is there a Crown Heights there too?

As it happens calling Jews Asians is an established form of race based animosity.

I’m aware of events there coming up when people rationalize the idea of organized race based animosity, lurking in the shadows amongst a fictionally amorphous group

We work side by side in downtown SF too.

OK, in side by side video windows for now...

"For now"? Judging by the average comment on this message board one gets the impression that working downtown at a software job is a thing of the past.

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