Silicon Valley’s Vast Wealth Disparity Deepens as Poverty Increased | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Valley’s Vast Wealth Disparity Deepens as Poverty Increased

sfgate.com

42 pointsrmason46 comments

I visited San Jose Diridon station. It was surrounded by parking lots. It was amazing to me that a train station with connections south and north to both San Francisco and Oakland is a desolate wasteland of parking lots devoid of people. If this happened in another country, the city planners would be voted out of office or disappeared.

That place should be full of 5-10 story buildings bustling with offices, shopping, and apartments/condos. California is urinating away so much potential.

Also, it is embarrassing that San Jose International airport does not even have a rail connection. Even second tier cities overseas make sure to have rail connections for foreign visitors who probably don't have a driver's license.

The US is the wild west and always will be. We are fundamentally a country that loves big desolate places that require rugged individualism to navigate. You can argue that there are pockets where this isn’t true, but I lived in post 9/11 NYC to see the worst pathologies of suburbanism creeping into Manhattan. The few real human scale areas (downtown,fidi) become disneyfied and overwhelmed. I have found it easier to embrace this reality than deny it.

It will be soon:

https://realestate.withgoogle.com/sanjose/

This is probably just because more people are working remotely than 3 years ago. Those lots would have been full in 2019.

The issue is not that the parking lots are empty, but that the rail station is surrounded by parking lots at all. This is a terrible waste of transit infrastructure! Rail stations should be located in densely developed areas close to destinations. If you put a station in a low-density area, that creates an opportunity to build a new efficient urban center. (In some countries, the land-value increment created through this kind of development is a large source of funding for transit infrastructure).

Most of the rail is meant to transport people from low density areas to city centers. I’m not sure how you would solve that problem without doing that?

San Jose has so much sprawl that for commuter rail, you really want that parking.

I respectfully disagree.

Trains and real estate go hand in hand. Without real estate, trains lose money. Without trains, real estate is worthless (hence parking lots, which are low value).

Trains and car owners don't mix. Trains + dense real estate usage displaces car owners and low-density real estate usage.

Cities should make car owners bicycles or ride the bus to the train station (ie remove parking lots) or cities should just not bother with trains.

I don't understand these arguments much. They sound more like sour grapes to some extent: If tech had not begun and become the powerhouse it did would the people who lived there have been better off in real terms? There is no reason that it couldn't have remained farmland like the Imperial valley. Ok, Oakland would still be a port and SF would be a financial hub. But most of the industry that thrived till the 70s, were slowly outcompeted by imports (bedding and furniture, is one example) and SF and SJ from the 80s were in decline before being girded by the burgeoning tech industry.

It also would mean we would not have attracted the foreign talent that also helped to drive the growth. Admittedly housing would be cheaper, and the population much lower, but I'm not sure I'd trade SJ and SF for Modesto and Sacramento, but to each their own.

> If tech had not begun and become the powerhouse it did would the people who lived there have been better off in real terms?

> Admittedly housing would be cheaper

Housing is the largest expense for most people, so yes, they would have been better off, because housing would be affordable.

Even software engineers consider housing there to be absurdly expensive.

Well, the Central valley and Imperial valley are there with cheap housing. But people want the benefits of both. Singapore is the same. It's expensive. Switzerland also, it's expensive.

If only there was a way to create new housing in California.

Or if only there was housing outside of California.

There's plenty of housing outside California, that's why there's an exodus out of here.

There’s plenty in California, just not a reasonable commute to the Bay Area if you need a good job.

What are the real terms of being better off?

Before big tech came in, San Francisco was the mecca for the disillusioned, adventure-seekers, protestors, hippies, artists, writers, and many more groups of people who wouldn't be able to afford SF at today's prices.

I suspect they'd be doing just fine if not for the tech boom.

Fresno is there for the taking. Some of the above live in and around the Salton Sea. Yes, people can cling on for sure. The main point is there is give and take. You win on one side and you lose on the other. Sure, without tech it could be something like Galveston. But there are vastly more people benefitting from the boom than those who suffer from the boom.

If you ask people, would you trade this economy for the previous economy where you you keep blue collar jobs and keep your creatives like writers and protesters, or you trade that opportunity for high technology jobs but lose creatives and protesters I think the majority of people will chose the latter.

> If you ask people, would you trade this economy for the previous economy where you you keep blue collar jobs and keep your creatives like writers and protesters, or you trade that opportunity for high technology jobs but lose creatives and protesters I think the majority of people will chose the latter.

Poll citation needed. Also, who would you be polling? If you only poll the winners of neighborhood gentrification, then of course they'll say gentrification is great.

Some references to the long history of class struggle in California include

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, The Golden Gulag https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520242012/golden-gulag

Huey P Newton (co-founder of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, CA October 1966) Revolutionary Suicide, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Suicide

Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/malcolm-harris/palo-alto/...

Mike Davis, City of Quartz https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Quartz

This is like complaining of unequal vehicles at an airport: A relatively few can fly very fast and hold hundreds of passengers, but most are earthbound-bound and can carry only a few passengers. Of course Silicon Valley has inequality: it’s home to some of the most impactful people on earth. Hobbling these people will do nothing to help the poor, just like crippling airliners will not improve the cars in airports parking lots.

> Hobbling these people

What does that mean exactly?

Subjecting them to even the smallest, mildest mote of criticism.

What a bizarre comparison.

That's a very weak criticism. I think his analogy was fairly clear in what it was saying. "Bizarre" seems to mean "I don't like what it implied." But why bother to tell us that? Tell us why you don't like it. Better, give us a reason why you think it's wrong.

I have seen poverty in a lot of places, and huge contrasts of wealth, but never the disparity I saw in SF. I’m talking about a Lamborghini parked next to a person lying on the floor, with no shoes, marred in their own excrements. It is crazy.

> Hobbling these people will do nothing to help the poor

There’s no one left to “hobble”.

Go to a developing country and its worse, way worse.

Not to say it isnt worth trying to fix.

I have spent a lot of time in GCC countries (Saudi, Qatar, UAE, Oman). It’s worse there in the sense that more people are dirt poor, but SF is worse in terms of more people being rich.

What I mean is, in UAE/Saudi, the poor people are just as bad as the poor people in SF. But there are very, very few rich people. There’s also a lot of not dirt poor people (still poor).

SF had so many many rich people and there or there are just as bad as the poor elsewhere.

Come to Asia. You'll see people far richer than those in Silicon Valley next to people who parasites and diseases the Western world eliminated 100 years ago.

Sure, but the rich won't be 15% of citizens of the city. It will be like 0.2-2%.

I'm confused. How is there being more people with less a better thing?

I have been to several developing countries. There was definitely more poor people there.

However, even if SF beggars might end up having more dollars in their pockets at the end of a day than someone in a developing country, the quality of life that they get is not so different. No shoes, spending the day sitting on a street, begging, sleeping on a cardboard box somewhere. SF weather is more benign than other what most developing countries have, granted.

My point is: I expected more from the wealthiest nation in the world. They have more than enough to dress, feed and shelter every one of their citizens, many times. Developing countries simply don’t. The fact that you are putting them together in the same phrase kind of makes my point. “Better than a developing nation” is an incredibly low bar to apply to the US.

Where is our resident homeless/hopefully formerly homeless HN resident? I hope she’s doing well.

I don’t think enough people realize that once you fall below a certain threshold, it’s virtually impossible to get back out without a lot of assistance.

This is one of the most disgusting things I've read in a long, long time.

> it’s home to some of the most impactful people on earth.

It's home to some of the most entitled jerkoffs on earth. This website needs to call out this rhetoric, because it's riddled with self-congratulatory garbage.

Go ahead and flag me or downvote my comment, but I really can't believe what I'm reading here sometimes.

You are on a website focused on tech startups. The people who succeed at tech startups become absurdly rich. I’m in agreement with the parent commenter that hobbling the superstars to give more to poor people is the wrong move. I’m disgusted that people disagree with me, but I also understand why most people remain poor.

If only they had invested early into scam internet tokens like you did, they wouldn’t have these problems

Saying monero is a scam token, shows how much you know about crypto.

This is what everyone says about their scam token.

Monero has proven at scale some cryptography that can be used to change everything. I recommend reading the codebases of projects before you write everything off as a scam. Monero is a legitimate project with enormous value, and active research on problems that matter; it is the primary private / anonymous digital cryptocurrency.

I dont know. Im pretty well off thanks to these “jerkoffs” not only in terms of access to technology but also lucrative employment.

Please don't fulminate or post in the flamewar style to HN. It's against the rules because, regardless of how right you are or feel you are, it leads to shitty threads. We're trying for better than that here, and you can make your substantive points without it.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

Note this one also: "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." It's reliably a marker of bad comments and worse threads.

Getting rid of homeless people will do nothing to techbros other than give them a fewer thing to complain about.

One person is an airline, another person is a car...

Not a very good comparison considering the basic needs of all people are practically the same: food, water, and shelter

It's like you're saying that "impactful people" "need" the Atherton mansions they live in to the same degree that the homeless need housing

Or in vehicle terms you're saying that one car needs a hangar as much as another car needs a parking spot (because the first one is driven to "more important" places)

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