I find it shocking that anyone still chooses to live in this broken city.
I left >4 years ago and am never coming back. It's unfixable.
Let's move the tech industry somewhere that isn't rotten to the core.
I left >4 years ago and am never coming back. It's unfixable.
Let's move the tech industry somewhere that isn't rotten to the core.
It was bad then and pandemic made it worse.
So many closed shops on Market St/Union Square area.
Walk a few blocks West and Tenderloin looks like doomsday. Lines for soup kitchens, tents, drugged-up and mentally-ill people walking like Zombies.
Since SF has some of the worst governance in the country, maybe it won't last that long. There's always East Bay.
If by East Bay you mean Oakland and its denizens, I don't see it happening. Oakland+Berkeley local govt makes SF appear very startup friendly.
I've heard it as LaMorinda - Lafayette, Moraga, & Orinda
Pick a city who wants to get the money and has fewer NIMBYs and has space to build. Move one office there and incentivize who wants to be there
This is how it was in the "good old days" with factories, no? But instead of IceRock, WI it will be a place close to the valley
But sometimes companies are lazy for places that don't have avocado toast I guess.
but the last time i went there, just before the pandemic, it was just... horrible. within 1h of leaving my hotel, i saw a guy breaking into a car. a block later, two homeless people were arguing and then started beating each other to a pulp.
and no police officers around anywhere.
It's especially bad considering SF's year round mild weather.
The areas where it doesn’t usually get as hot get bitterly cold in the winter.
Implied is that you didn't do anything about either of these things you witnessed. I don't mean to single you out, but collectively for the people of the city: wouldn't it be better if you stopped expecting somebody else to fix the problems? Instead, be part of a better community by trying to right what wrongs you can. At the very least, photograph the thief and send it to the police, if not trying to stop him yourself. Similar for the fighting homeless people.
Yeah, maybe that's dangerous. I don't want to start the conversation of Californians trying so hard to give up their right to self defense. But maybe that's the reason we don't see such a big problem in, e.g., Texas.
Most pay taxes, sometimes very high taxes. And, San Franciscans have voted to have someone else fix the issue.
The citizens gave the monopoly of violence to the government, so citizens would be safe. The government has stopped protecting its citizens and their property. The social contract is broken.
Now they are where they are.
But although the SFans made a deal with the devil, there's no reason they can't go back and change that. It's not written in blood, they still can go take back their community themselves.
They leave. Gone. Poof.
For something to turn around, you have to make an investment (money/time). People with money and means are going to invest elsewhere especially since they don't really have a true community to defend. They started as transients, remember that. No generations of family. No roots.
As per other comments, the police won't act on it and if they do the DA won't and even when all this happens they get let go of easily and come back for more. Lots of these people are repeat offenders.
The local SF TV streamers and memers should re-broadcast Charles Bronson's "Death Wish" movies. Perhaps doing so will inspire civic responsibility in SFans! IIRC there's even a bit of drone technology in one of the later movies.8-))
>"At the very least, photograph the thief and send it to the police, if not trying to stop him yourself."<
is the very definition of "foolhardy".
Sibling mentioned contacting the police and got no good response.
Union Square is uncomfortably close to the TL.
Austin has rich cultural background that is different. Moving to Austin won't change it into SF unless enough people bring failed ideas with them.
> Hippie Hollow Park (originally known as McGregor County Park) is a park located on the shore of Lake Travis in northwest Austin. It is the only legally recognized clothing-optional public park in the State of Texas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippie_Hollow_Park
If you're going to Austin to escape a lefty culture on the west coast, then you've probably found the exact worst city in Texas to do so.
It is specifically the decision to keep housing close to zero-sum that makes this such a catastrophe. SF isn’t the only place that would make that decision, but is also possible to welcome & accommodate growth rather than trying to strangle it at the expense of all your renters.
If society thought of housing similarly to other large purchases like cars in that there was no expectation of profit, we would all be a lot better off.
Now what caused this housing as investment idea? I haven’t seen any research on this, but my guess would be as a form of forced retirement savings as it allows people to build net worth without the self-control normally required of saving. And the difficulty of that delayed gratification is really just human nature.
And you don't get margin called.
150x leverage means 150x cashflow burden from taxation (> 100%!) and also maintenance costs of the property.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35044028 where I laid out how a real estate purchase is really a mix of multiple investments packaged into one sale.
To what extent the crime policies contribute statistically I don't know, but for some of the more extreme mental illness cases (that disproportionately account for homeless people being actively aggressive), there is a disconnect between philosophical ideals and what practically would be better for everyone in the long run. Mental illness (especially when substance abuse is involved) can make someone resist help and they will be unlikely to improve unless they are forced into a facility. Where the line is for doing this is a tough question but if someone is routinely threatening people on the street or does something violent, it seems like SF policy is still opposed to it.
I don't think people realize how much of an outlier SF is. Incomes are a good 25% or so higher than NYC and Boston. The percentage of the people who work in tech in SF isn't really comparably to any other city and their own high paying industries.
I think the problems with SF are largely cultural and political rather than technological or economic, though the economic issues are exacerbating it. It's an "anything goes" city and has been for 150+ years. The city values your ability to express yourself in any way you please, and that includes both healthy forms like street fairs, neighborhood scavenger hunts, or Bring Your Own Big Wheel, and less-healthy forms like being able to shit on the sidewalk when you please or stab someone who looks at you funny. And that filters down to the voting preferences of the electorate. You get what you ask for.
The South Bay has all the same problems of tech dominance, income inequality, insane housing prices, etc, but the cultural orientation is very different. People in the South Bay are generally there to work hard and build a better life for themselves and their descendants. Their time-orientation is much more long-term than SF culture. And that applies across the income spectrum - even poor, Hispanic, immigrant day-workers will do their best to make sure their kids do their homework. The type of tech industry that spills out of this also reflects this cultural orientation, with the South Bay doing much more foundational engineering research and SF being more focused on how to apply technical breakthroughs from 50 miles south in new and crazy ways.
Places like Texas, with a property tax and little zoning, would handle a concentration of wealth better. Although, it'd be even more optional with a land tax instead of a property tax.
You're talking about raw communism, whether or not you know it. It is immaterial whether or not land is forcibly taken or the (I assume federal) "land tax" is raised to the degree that no one can afford land except government subsidized high density housing developers. With this being the intent of raising the tax to whatever level it falls.
You may as well just confiscate the land and dispense with the pretense.
Before you begin confiscating land, try proving that inequality issues can be solved with parallel yet less potentially damaging measures. As a test run. For example, begin with educational outcomes. What have been the quantitative results of massive funding toward eliminating educational inequality? Metros like DC have some of the highest per student public school funds in the Nation.
The housing parallel is the failed social history of high density urban "projects". Which no one likes to live in nor to be around. And which have been a disaster for urban areas, with few exceptions.
Explain how government forced divestment from single family private land ownership is capitalism. Other than communism, you seem to be thinking of a potential action inherent within fascism.
Singapore - https://stackedhomes.com/editorial/land-ownership-in-singapo...
Hong Kong - https://www.landsd.gov.hk/en/resources/land-info-stat/land-t...
Some of this might have been because of the impression Georgism had on some of the Chinese revolutionaries, including Sun Yat-Sen himself:
https://taiwantoday.tw/news.php?unit=8&post=13799&unitname=E...
It's also because, by coincidence, U.S. State Department official Wolf Ladejinsky was influenced by Georgism. He was certainly no fan of communism, as he was a Ukrainian refugee from Bolshevik rule!
https://www.reddit.com/r/georgism/comments/10uzddk/the_georg...
Incidentally, while Taiwan does not have exclusive government ownership of land unlike Singapore, Hong Kong, or mainland China, it is a very successful example of land reform (which involved confiscation):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reform_in_Taiwan
https://asianometry.substack.com/p/how-the-kmt-achieved-land...
https://cooperative-individualism.org/medaille-john_taiwan-a...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23211692
In fact it would be foolish to buy property in such a market unless you are rich or something limits tax increases.
We had affordable housing in California in the past without any pie-in-the-sky stuff like land-value taxes.
So don't dismiss that tech workers are a proximate cause here.
Of course, when you bring up Manhattanizing Mission, most of these "YIMBY" astro-turf types start screeching. They want theirs, and as soon as they get it they'll be pulling up the ladder behind them. But keep your filthy mittens off the Mission.
> Today's outrageous prices are exactly in line with the 6.6% trend that began 60 years ago.
https://experimental-geography.blogspot.com/2016/05/employme...
For another, look at the history of the city, we have been a nut house for ~150 years, since the gold was discovered. We had an Emperor! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Norton
It's pretty obvious on the ground in SF that the homeless problem is fundamentally a problem of mental illness and drug abuse. A fairly large portion of the homeless there are not from SF but came there because SF tolerates behavior other cities do not. Even if there was an empty, free house offered to every homeless person in SF there would still be a massive problem because many of them would be unwilling to accept it.
I have family out in Idaho, and they complain that there a lot of folks from California moving there and screwing up the local politics by voting for policies that broke the state of California. They joke that the first thing people do is change their plates because they don't want anyone to know they're from Cali. I can't blame them, though, because it is an absolute train-wreck of a state whose condition is epitomized by SanFran.
It’s just easier to see in SF because the elements are far less likely to kill you here and we’ve decriminalized homelessness.
I'm not saying that's a problem unique to SF, but SF can solve it without fixing the political issues that affect the rest of the country.
Plus they have a sweet setup since they're the 18th-most dependent state on Federal aid, so they'll glad take money from train-wreck states like California, they just don't want the people.
You're begging the question. Reasonable, empathetic people are capable of thinking that "gender-affirming care" is an ideologically-driven phenomenon that does more harm than good.
> Plus they have a sweet setup since they're the 18th-most dependent state on Federal aid
Do you feel the same way about Virginia (second highest per capita federal balance of payments), New Mexico (4th), or Maine (9th)? They're all blue states that receive a lot more from the federal government than they pay in.
Do you also feel the same way about high income earners paying more than they get back? Because effectively that's what you're describing. California has a lot of high incomes and because the federal government does a lot of redistributing via taxation, the state as a whole pays more than it gets back. Though if you look at the per capita data[0], it works out to a few hundred bucks a year. It's also worth mentioning that since Covid, every single state has received more than it paid, and in aggregate California the most by far (which makes sense, since it's the most populous state). So California too has a sweet setup.
Implicit behind your sentiment is the idea that the "train-wreck" policies in California is causative of the high incomes that has it pay more than it gets back from the federal government. That is, your argument paraphrased is that conservative Idahoans can't criticize progressive Californians since California with its progressive policies has high incomes that pay for some of Idaho's bills via redistributed federal taxation. I find that assumption unpersuasive.
[0]: https://rockinst.org/issue-areas/fiscal-analysis/balance-of-...
Reasonable, empathetic people who have no experience with an issue personally should mind their own damn business regarding other people's medical decisions, especially when they themselves are actually, demonstrably (not suspectedly) ideologically motivated.
Sorry, kids don't get to make medical decisions and adults don't get to make harmful decisions for them. Your rant is borderline suited to an adult, and no one else. Last, imagine couching anti-child castration and mutilation as "ideological". Competent adults label this position to as sanity.
No one is castrating children. These are medically accepted practices and you are not a practicing physician and making that comparison is unhinged.
Also, plenty of babies are sexually altered when their sex is undeterminable would you advocate not doing that?
Leave medicine to physicians and their patients and stop putting your ideology and religion and gender anxiety on kids that aren't yours.
Actually, adults that are the parents of children get to make all sorts of decisions for children, harmful and not harmful. It's literally none of your business.
I believe exposing children to organized religion is inherently harmful because it inhibits the development of a scientific, evidence-based temperament that I think is an important part of good moral character. Yet billions of people drag their children to churches, mosques and temples every day.
I saw a lot of push and propaganda in schools to subvert this setup, for my kids in the name of ideology. This is now the #1 issue for me to push back on. Just a single data point.
edit, responding to below:
By "heavy advertising" do you mean letting kids know it is a thing that exists? Because that's just teaching kids the facts of life, something schools have a responsibility to do (since apparently you're not willing to tell your kids that medical transition exists?) It falls under the same bucket as sex education, another thing that schools should do regardless of whether the parents think it's OK or not.
Schools don't make medical decisions, doctors do.
edit 2:
MEDICAL transition.
Relevant quote:
===
Even though the policy states that “the goal in all cases is to strive for consensus between parents/guardians and student as to the application of this policy,” it adds that the decision to participate in the “gender transition plan” belongs to the student, and “does not require additional parent/guardian consent”—unless parental/guardian rights under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), or other applicable law, would be implicated.
[0] https://www.ntd.com/parents-and-legal-guardians-excluded-fro...
"Schools transitioning children" is not a coherent phrase. "Transition" in the gender sense is not a transitive verb; transition is not something done to someone by others, is something that person does themselves.
First, that anyone not agreeing with your position is actually and demonstrably ideologically motivated. It may be one of the surest signs that your position is not based on reason, when you perceive it to be so blindingly clear that anyone disagreeing must have an ulterior motive. There's another commenter who said that the only way anyone could oppose their position is through stupidity, which is along the same vein.
Second, that people should mind their own damn business. I agree with this on principle, but it does have its limits. Am I wrong to be concerned about and disapproving of the practice of female genital mutilation in parts of the world? After all, it doesn't directly affect me one bit. I suppose you might consider me a cultural imperialist for thinking it a barbaric practice. Should I equally mind my own business if I see a neighbor routinely take opiates to the point of stupor? That's his medical decision, and one that I have no experience with personally.
At some point, the line between well-meaning non-judgmentalism and craven indifference is blurred. I want to help repair the social fabric in this country because I feel it is torn and tattered. The way to do that is through open dialogue on what I think is right and wrong. I can admit that this can be taken too far, and has been in the past on many matters. What you suggest is that I keep it to myself and don't condemn others, no matter what I see, because everyone walks in their own pair of shoes. I'm not convinced that this is the better way; at least one that doesn't end up in a world where everyone only cares about themselves.
To put another way: can you imagine a fast-spreading, medically-involved phenomenon that affects minors in the long term that you would be concerned about, even if you had no personal experience with it? Or is such a thing not possible in your view?
I said that the people who were doing were demonstrably ideologically motivated. This is because it is true and evidenced. This has nothing to do with how I feel.
> Am I wrong to be concerned about and disapproving of the practice of female genital mutilation in parts of the world?
Is FGM a medically accepted practice? No? Then it has no relevance to this discussion.
> At some point, the line between well-meaning non-judgmentalism and craven indifference is blurred.
This is ideologically motivated people advocating that politicians and laypeople legislate medical decision making that should be between a doctor and his patient and their guardians. Whatever else is drummed up by comparing it to barbaric practices ask yourself this: would you want a politician telling you what is medically appropriate for your child?
The only way it is possible for a reasonable, empathetic person to believe that the state government banning GAC is good, is if they're stupid. Which is ok to some degree, many people are stupid.
I oppose gender affirming care on the grounds that it does not effectively improve a person's life (which we can see over a 30 year period in [0]) and that it often requires damaging the delicate balance of the biological machine that is the human body.
If that makes me "stupid", so be it.
[0] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... [1] https://www.thetrevorproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/... << Warning, PDF.
Next question?
HRT vs lithium? Dunno, I'm not a doctor.
I do know that exogenous hormones can cause a body to stop producing the hormone, even at sub-clinical levels.
I also know that GAC surgeries cannot be undone. But you can stop taking lithium.
And all of this in the face of 40+% suicide rate that isn't affected by GAC in the slightest.
Who is the ideological one here?
edit: I'm going to say this very slowly:
The Sweden study
about suicide rates
was done in a time
when the Swedish government
mandated sterilization
for trans people.
Does that help?
edit 2: since it's still not clear:
The
Sweden
study
about
suicide rates
was done
in a time
when
the Swedish government
mandated
sterilization
for
trans people.
And the Trevor Project report shows a number of interventions that provide statistically significant reduction in suicidal ideation and attempts. I assume you support those interventions, since you seem extremely considered with the suicide rates of LGBTQ youth.
It does say:
>Affirming gender identity among transgender and nonbinary youth is consistently associated with lower rates of suicide attempts.
And the report actually says nothing about transition healthcare.
That's crazy, my trans masc friend Kyle just carried a baby to term and delivered it, but to be fair I can't 100% confirm he didn't just hide a frozen turkey under his cardigan for 9 months
edit: responding to prottog:
> gender dysphoria was classified a mental illness [...] It's only very recently that with the former we started to take the (mentally unwell) patient's word over evidence.
You're the one begging the question now.
If gender dysphoria really is a mental illness, why are regret rates for gender-affirming care so low? One of the defining characteristics of a mental illness is that if you "feed into it", it gets worse. For example, with schizophrenia, you should not validate the voices someone might be hearing because doing so makes it worse. The situation with gender dysphoria is exactly the opposite.
As recently as ten years ago, with DSM-5, gender dysphoria was classified a mental illness, much like how anorexia is still classified as one. It's only very recently that with the former we started to take the (mentally unwell) patient's word over evidence.
Doctors used to say that cigarettes were good for you. I suspect that we'll look back at gender-affirming care the same way in a few decades.
Do your suspicions in this instance merit an intervention in care for other people? At what point do your 'feelings' matter so much that you get to tell other people what to do medically with their own children? Apply this in an inverse fashion -- at what point do other people who suspect doctors are not right get to tell you how to make medical decision regarding your children?
Let's compare how many times Doctors as a group have been wrong about something vs Politicians. Are you still for Politicians making medical decisions for people?
Quite a straw man you built there! I hold no such opinion.
> Reasonable, empathetic people are capable of thinking that "gender-affirming care" is an ideologically-driven phenomenon
No reasonable, empathetic people that are in any genuine contact with trans kids are likely to feel this way, considering suicide rates and mental health outcomes of gender-affirming healthcare.
>Do you feel the same way about Virginia (second highest per capita federal balance of payments), New Mexico (4th), or Maine (9th)?
Are people from those states voicing the opinion that their states are well-function oases relative to the "train-wreck" that is California? I haven't heard much of it. Yet it's pretty common for red-state folks to rag on California as if their welfare governments aren't benefiting from our homofemitrans tax dollars.
>in aggregate
lol, this is a profoundly unserious point
Is it so wrong for people to want to be left alone? We're talking a minority (which was the majority not too long ago) wanting to be left to their social and religious moors. The whole political mess in the US is driven by a clash of ideologies.
> don't be a trans kid since the state government just barely averted banning appropriate healthcare for teenagers
Case in point: many people in the United States disagree with surgically altering minors' genitalia, for whatever reason. And they'd prefer such policies to not be implemented where they live. This is part of the "please, just leave me alone" attitude.
More relevant to this topic (crime in SF): many people in the United States would prefer for crime to actually be punished, with punishments that are actually effective. Making it legal to loot up to 1000 USD in merch isn't going to deter crime, it does the opposite. Because the law is cancerous at this point, honest business ventures are closing up shop. People in other states see the cancer and (rightly, I think) say they don't want any part of it.
Not really. When you actually analyze the situation what you have is a bunch of folks who would like to just live their lives (you know, people who are gay, or non-white, or female.)
But there are some people who are upset by this, and want to stop it, who treat it like some battle for the soul of the Nation. They go out of their way to persecute and abuse other people for no reason other than they don't like them. Mostly they are members of various weird quasi-Christian religions.
So it's not really a "clash of ideologies" so much as it is attacks by radical religious people on anybody and everybody that won't toe their religeous/ideological belief systems.
Seattle is very under appreciated imo. The pandemic didn’t do it any favors but it’s more affordable than the eastside suburbs with all the things you’d want from a city plus access to nature. Not everywhere is 3rd and Pike.
This is coming from someone who has never lived in SF.
$3m dollar homes, extremely high office rents, wasted energy and time on commuting, higher comp expenses, smaller hiring pool. Even if centralization/in-person is more efficient, likely not efficient to enough to overcome these economics.
The businesses that learn how to maneuver in a decentralized/online first manner have huge starting advantages over those that don't. Though, we will see in time.
It's possible the centralization gap will be much smaller in cities that choose to meet demand for housing/office/amenities.
More than one phone prototype can be made and shipped to different branch offices, for example. Do you need the entire company working off one hardware prototype? Is that even a practical way to iterate? Not really. It's only the more bespoke/expensive hardware that is more difficult to distribute.
But software employment is currently much larger percentage of the IT workforce anyway
That was also the last great opportunity to buy a home there too.
A "safe" SF only existed for about 20 years total.
"Forget it Jake, it's Chinatown"
The recent increase in violent crime in SF is still lower than any period in the 00s or 10s except the three-year window from 2009-2011.
FWIW, where I live (outside Austin, but I don't think that's specifically relevant), as you predict, I don't feel that everyone just understands exactly what my job is. On the other hand, I do feel like people are curious and eager to learn. I find (I know, just one datapoint) that whether I'm talking to somebody from our local semiconductor industry or a lifelong Texas rancher, there's some respect for the idea that we prosper by being a community from all walks of life.
ETA: I'm not necessarily talking about any kind of "protected class" of race/gender/whatever. I mean people that are rich and poor, Christian and Buddhist and atheist and whatever, techies and ranchers and oilmen, and so forth. In other words, people who really have different ways of interacting with the world, not just skin deep.
Perhaps, but after years of you being the person who is not valued, precisely because you are 'diverse', the idea of a homogenous group is likely appealing. I don't quite count myself in there, but I do live in a rural area, and there aren't as many people in software as there are in other industries. I don't particularly get the sense that people who don't know what I do care to learn or are all that curious, on the whole.
Zoom and FaceTime won’t replicate this. The question is whether AR and VR can come close within 10 years?
I fixed this in response to Green Man's comment.
I'm sorry, I'm sure this was an innocent typo, but seeing a "tech bro" mythologize the midwest and then misspell Oklahoma is just too funny. You realize OKC has a higher violent crime rate than SF right?
Oklahoma had the highest incarceration rate in the United States (or the world if you compared it to other countries). Most of the people in prison there are in for drug crimes.
I just think it's so bizarre watching people act as if Oklahoma of all places is a beacon of rational governance and domestic tranquility.
(Source: I grew up there and it's no different from most other places in the country. Our country's problems are dispersed fairly homogeneously. The opioid crisis is not limited to cities and neither is homelessness)
Pretty much every midwestern city of any size is violent as fuck. STL, KC, Indy, Chicago, OKC, all are so much scarier than San Francisco.
Suburbanites are insulated by 20 miles of highway from the problematic areas and can't even fathom what it's like-- the talking heads on their TV are more real to them than whatever is happening in the inner city. But even then their kids are popping xanax and getting DUIs. They just have a better support system and can continue functioning in society instead of getting locked up. In rural areas too, there's so much drug crime and violent crime.
The unfortunate part is that our anti-poor propaganda works flawlessly even on the conventionally "smart" as we can see in threads like these.
So people see all that a city has to offer when they go to SF, while they'll never set foot in East New York.
NYC is a great example. Was a dump until Giuliani came in and became the gold standard city when Bloomberg took over for 12 years. He called himself a Democrat at the end, but they all hated him because he was pragmatic and got shit done. There was a tension there though and it worked out well.
DeBlasio came in and almost immediately things started to turn. As SF has consolidated power it has just fell off the deep end. Chicago has this story going for 50 years.
Progressives ran these places in the 70’s and 80’s and they went moderate in the 90’s and 00’s mainly. Progressive last 10 or so years and they’re dying again.
We also just had covid and are currently in an economic crisis. Why wouldn't this have more effect on crime
Rudolph W. Giuliani 1994-2001
Shouldn't the crime rate in 2000 be lower than today? He wasn't a progressive, he followed the broken window theory, cracked down on small crimes, blah blah evidence.
You think crime is bad in nyc because of a campaign by Republicans/conservatives to make cities look bad combined with an actual recent hike in crime probably due to Covid causing layoffs in the service sector and now inflation
Red states are the poorest states in the country. They have more murders and other crime than blue states.
Just because you hide deep poverty and drug abuse behind gutted-out, falling down houses, doesn't mean it doesn't exist
> every midwestern city of any size is violent as fuck. STL, KC, Indy, Chicago, OKC
If there's nothing there, why are they so violent? Answer: they really aren't. If you've lived in a midwestern city you'd know that there are areas that have more violence (like probably any city) than others, but I would wager that proportionally they're much smaller compared to outlying metro areas than larger cities.
Most of that time in both cities was in business and/or tourist districts. There are pockets of Chicago I would definitely avoid, but the core felt safe. In SF, the core does not feel safe.
At least in the Midwest the thugs have the courtesy to congregate in known bad areas.
I don’t have a mythologized impression of the Midwest. I spent a lot of time working in emergency services in one of Ohio’s poorest counties before moving on.
I am familiar on a first person basis with the Columbus metro’s problems at a minimum. No, I don’t think New Albany or Upper Arlington are representative.
* https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/...
Of course, none of this causes drug addiction and mental illness.
The massive wealth brought by the tech industry could easily allow abundance. But when it’s impossible to build anything, it doesn’t matter how much money is raised via taxing that wealth, it just goes everywhere OTHER than building housing, which is needed desperately for lower income folk there and working class folk who do the work in healthcare.
A fixed amount of housing will just get bid up and up and up into the stratosphere. And for the progressive Boomer types who bought into the market decades ago and are now sitting on multimillion dollar property valuations, they will support any measure other than one which increases supply in a way that could reduce their property values (see Robert Reich). It’s a recipe for misery.
And Robert Reich is why I think that concern about inequality is not actually a productive route to fixing the problem. He’s one of THE greatest voices decrying inequality (and in the past I really agreed with a lot he had to say), and when push came to shove, he opposed new housing in his area (Berkeley) which could’ve threatened his household wealth. Be concerned about “community voice” and the power of existing homeowners (which in SF means millionaires or more) to oppose building housing.
Question those who question—under the guise of progressive (or conservative) goals—the creation of abundance. “Sure, you’re creating greater overall wealth that will help the vast majority of people, but the wrong people get most of the benefit.”
I cannot agree with you more on this point. The whole history of capitalism and all it depends on (rule of law, strong private property rights, laissez-faire economic policies) has been one of a rising tide lifting all boats.
Now in the developed world, material wealth has gotten to such a level that people in power are much more keen on divvying up the pie as they see fit than baking more pie. People have gotten myopic on this topic because they see more wealth than ever before; they question why we need to create more wealth, instead of spreading the existing wealth around? And that leads to precisely the kind of thinking you underlined: a further rising tide is bad, if some people end up in bigger yachts.
"High wages" are not the issue, inequality is, and the largest contributor to that are low wages.
We should be fighting poverty, not aiming at the middle class to earn less.
Why the shift? Is your problem that Musk is much richer than the 1% (inequality), or is it that there are people without anything at all?
I get the sense that people in HN believe that most tech workers in the Bay Area are some sort of high rolling millionaires. They mostly are not, and the proof is that most are priced out of housing in SF too.
Saying that inequality is caused by tech workers is thus a myopic statement.
Everyone else: "SF is full of lefty commies".
Let's appreciate the...irony? Cognitive dissonance? Misunderstanding? I don't even know what it is.
The foundation of safe cities is vibrant local communities with historic roots. Parts of the city where people choose to have and raise kids. Places with a sense of shared community where neighbors look out for each other.
The rapid influx of extremely high income individuals transformed SF over the course of the last decade. Uprooting those communities and replacing them with largely transient techworkers with no real interest in forming communities that don't help them to increase their TC and level up with their next new role.
Then when tech declines you really see the impact this has.
SF was treated as basically a luxury mall for rich tech workers to get whatever they want whenever they want. As tech workers start to leave it's no wonder the city feels like an abandoned mall.
Like Hayes Valley used to be crack dens until Twitter money, Mission District was a Latino ghetto until FB money, and Portrero Hill and West Add were the African American projects. Plus Chinatown and Tenderloin had an active Triad and Vietnamese+Cambodian gang presence.
Now you see upper net worth people living in Hayes Valley, houses in Portrero go for millions, every new grad SWE getting a shithole studio within walking distance of DoLo Park, much of Polk St and northern Tenderloin is now classified as "Lower Nob Hill", and all the Triad members and Viet gangs got caught in the ICE dragnet or retired.
I lived in Potrero hill and Hayes valley in the early 2000s and was no stranger to the mission.
Your comment is completely false.
Americans are entitled to move within the United States. Always have been, always will be. You can keep trying for de facto migration controls all you want, but you will never be able to dial them in to curate exactly the population you want. It will always blow up in your face like this. That’s very, very good and it makes me damn proud to be an American. This isn’t the feudal system. We don’t allocative the best land to the people born on it. It’s insane that this ever became a left-coded position.
This claim isn't backed up by the demographic info of SF [0], and SF has historically been a very diverse, immigrant friendly city.
Percentage of US born (as well as specifically California born) residents of SF started to rise with the tech boom. The lowest number of US born residents of SF was 2000, it rose slightly by 2010 and continued to increase into 2020.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_San_Francisco
So I think we agree: tech people came in, attempted to displace the local community and trampled on their values (and claimed them "xenophobic" for resisting).
And now that the tech community is withdrawing what's left is a broken city without the community and shared values that once defined it.
The tech community wanted SF to be a shopping mall for rich tech workers, some parts of the community resisted being turned into a shopping mall, they lost and now SF is rotten.
Trying to approximate these hukou-style controls through building permits is what created displacement - tech people just wanted places to live.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.