Hacker News Reader

Comment by baggy_trough | Hacker News Reader

You would have to be stark raving mad to open a business in San Francisco. Not only is the downtown filthy and unsafe, but the government, when it can stir itself from its torpid incompetence, is absolutely malevolent towards businesses.

View on HN

In the Castro business owners are threatening to stop paying taxes. It could be another historically important example of San Franciscans using civil disobedience to great effect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eSL-ZFmFpY

> but the government ... is absolutely malevolent towards businesses.

How so?

It kind of depends.

Opening a restaurant is an absolutely hostile experience -- there are numerous articles discussing people's experiences.

Opening a tech company in SF is very smooth sailing in the small (interaction with the government, registering, paying taxes, etc). Source: did it.

Where SF fucks tech companies extraordinarily hard is housing costs (insane), commute times / options (even more insane, shockingly incompetent), and the horrible provision of education, a major concern for parents.

Given this experience, would you start a company in SF again? If not, where?

I'd definitely do it in sf again. I'd have a 4 person + one large conference room office for sales and meetings. Everybody else would be remote, with individual teams roughly colocated, and hence capable of 3-5 days/month in person.

The problem with sf is good fucking luck convincing anybody to move there if they're over, say, 25; or are married; or have kids; etc. One glance at the housing prices and they're gone. If they can work through the housing prices they glance at the school situation, price in $30k/year of private education, and then they're really gone.

Gross receipts tax of 0.69% plus 1.5% payroll tax [1]. $20,000 trash cans [2] and arcane permitting processes for brick and mortar businesses. The city's leadership has their head so far up their ass about going after rich techies that they proposed a tax which was intended to target Amazon, but was so poorly written that they asked to retract it off the ballot because Amazon wasn't subject to the tax but small businesses were [3].

[1] https://ballotpedia.org/San_Francisco,_California,_Propositi...

[2] https://sfstandard.com/politics/heres-what-a-san-francisco-2...

[3] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/S-F-activists-wanted-...

Not to mention allowing camping and undesirability, and property crime like smashed windows and stolen bikes, open air drug use, just to name a few. Source - lived in East Bay, worked in SF for almost a decade.

I'm not a SF resident, but a 1.5% payroll tax doesn't seem that bad? NYC's is over double that.

$20,000 for a pilot trash can is pretty ridiculous, however.

  $20,000 for a pilot trash can is pretty ridiculous, however.

$20,000 was for a one off (well, each of the three custom designs cost about that much) garbage can. The off-the-shelf models cost between $600 and $2,800 and the city budgeted no more than $3,000 per can.

https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/for-a-trash-can-in-san...

Not to press this point too hard, but "no more than $3,000 per can" is still ridiculous. They're $175 apiece here[1].

I can understand spending $20,000 (or even $60,000) on the pilot designs. But TFA makes it sound like the city was billed $20,000 just to fabricate it.

Edit: Updated the link to a better article.

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-04/new-york-...

The VOA article seems to me to imply that the whole development cost was $20,000.

  It is proving to be a costly project. One of the trash cans under consideration
  cost more than $20,000 and took four years to make.

"The Planning Department, like always, required him to notify neighbors of the plan and allowed any one of them within 150 feet to object. Neighbors learned about the project in late February and had until mid-April to complain. And someone did complain, triggering a hearing at the Planning Commission, which can take 12 weeks to schedule. That’s many months of rent flushed away because one neighbor doesn’t like what’s allowed by the city.

San Francisco stands out among American cities for many reasons, and this ridiculous system is sadly one of them.

In Yu’s case, the complaining neighbor was a competing ice cream shop. It doesn’t take a genius to see why that shop might gripe, but nevertheless Yu had to hire a lawyer and wait until the hearing on June 11 to do any more work on his shop."

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Bi...

> Not only is the downtown filthy and unsafe

That's why tons of companies have moved out of the old downtown and created a new downtown in the east cut. It's clean and organized.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com