Comment by aurareturn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aurareturn | Hacker News Reader

Being a native San Francisco citizen (born, schooled, worked), it's sad. The government officials were riding/wasting tech tax money for 15 years. They were actively hostile to tech companies - thinking that the industry will never leave the city and that the tax well would never run dry. They funneled tech tax money to the lower class in order to win populist votes. Tech tax money made them rich. They paid themselves a higher salary. At the same time, they were publicly anti-tech. It was a stark contrast to the Ed Lee era, where he did everything he can to attract tech companies such as giving tax handouts.

It turns out that tech companies were key to prevent the "Detroit-ification" of San Francisco. Tech companies mixed local drug users, deadbeats, and shady/violent people with Stanford, Cal, MIT, Caltech graduates and generally people who contribute to society. This made the city much wealthier and safer. As a native San Franciso citizen, I welcomed the change.

If you browsed /r/sanfrancisco in 2016, you would have seen how anti-tech everyone was. The users there were convinced that tech companies made the city worse. Now what? Where are those people now? I bet most of them left the city after realizing that the safety and money tech brought is now gone. Isn't this what they wanted?

Ed Lee:

Lee has been credited with catalyzing San Francisco’s tech boom early in his term by passing a business-friendly tax-exemption that he (correctly) predicted would help lure economic development into a distressed part of town. Called the Central Market-Tenderloin Area Payroll Expense Tax Exclusion, it waived payroll taxes for companies whose payroll exceeded $1 million in exchange for a community benefits agreement, and a commitment to build in the Tenderloin area. After Lee used the exemption to harpoon Twitter in 2012, it became sourly known as the “Twitter Tax Break.” Other tech companies like Uber, Airbnb, Pinterest, and Dropbox followed Twitter into the city, bringing with them municipal grants, large philanthropic donations to non-profits, and increased local purchasing—in exchange for whopping tax breaks diverted from the city budget.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-12/what-ed-l...

Without Ed Lee's tech friendly policies, San Francisco's tech industry might have never boomed the way it did.

As a resident of San Francisco from before the tech era, during, and after, I can recall just how awesome and transformative the first wave of tech companies were to the city. Those companies were Twitter, Uber, Airbnb. Maybe a few more that I forgot. They kick started the tech wave. Many tech companies spawned from larger ones.

The results of smart decisions take more than 1 electoral cycle to become apparent, so it seems more of a problem of the fundamental structure and incentives.

San Francisco has a lot of naturally amazing attractions for tech companies. It's a real city so smart, young people from Cal and Stanford want to live in it after graduating. Young adults don't want to move to the suburbs of Silicon Valley. They want something more fun so they want to live in the city. San Francisco also has some of the best weather in the country and is surrounded by nature.

All it takes for San Francisco to have an amazing economy is to not f up.

While I agree with the overall point, the thing that always made me sad was that corridor/area along Market never really got better. Sure, it was a bit safer and cleaner than it was pre-2012 (and than it is now), but it was still not a place I'd choose to hang out.

To be fair, many of the people who left did so because rents just got too damn high, and purchasing a home was completely out of their reach.

I do agree with you that the influx of money that came with the tech boom did clean things up a bit, and make things a bit safer (didn't stop me from getting mugged in the Mission in 2013, though, but I digress). But the soaring demand for housing, and the city's complete inability to build more, drove a lot of low- and middle-income folks out.

(And I say this as a tech person who greatly benefited from all this. With very mixed feelings.)

I was never a huge fan of Ed Lee (didn't strongly dislike him, just was kinda meh on him), but after seeing the results of Breed's leadership... wow, I really miss Ed Lee.

Geographic subreddits are a poor mechanism to gauge sentiment of a city. Reddit itself is already a very skewed sample, and one does not need to actually live or visit the city to participate.

Yep. Digital divide and Genchi Genbutsu. You have to go there and talk to people.

If I were there, I would head to the Vesuvio Cafe or Specs and ask what people think.

Someone borrowing $725 MM (probably interest only) to buy downtown property and having to sell it for no residual equity with rising interest rates isn't a unique-to-SF problem. It's happening in major cities all over the US. Nothing SF specific at all.

So frustrating as a former resident to see how much the city was taking in via taxes and how little we as residents were getting to show for it. How slowly and how poorly those dollars were being deployed.

it's actually really frustrating-- moved to sf during the pandemic. it was empty but didn't feel so bad. it feels way worse now, lots of shops closed up or moved, a lot of sketchy areas downtown, the whole foods closed mid-market, so i'm moving to south bay. can definitely afford it, but wanted the car-free life.

coming from europe, it's sad and disappointing. last time i was in sf was in 2016 or so for work and it felt way better, and that was commuting to soma and walking around market at night

I hosted a lot of couch surfing travelers in the Tenderloin from 2016 to 2019. The first thing each of them commented on was the number of homeless people in SF. It was honestly embarrassing.

The tenderloin was always like that. It was a lot more tolerable in 2016 - 2019 than before and after.

I'm no SF expert and haven't been back in a long time, but I used to travel there in early 2000s and thought the number of homeless and agressive people was a lot more than where I lived in both LA and NYC.

Knowing how post-pandemic and post wealth grab has made the homeless population grow I can only guess how SF looks now.

If you haven't moved yet, and are open to giving SF another chance, pick a new neighborhood. Based on your post, I'm guessing you lived in SoMa? It's... kinda the worst, honestly. I moved to the Dogpatch right before the pandemic (from SoMa) and am fantastically happy. The pandemic did kill a few businesses, but others have sprouted up in their place.

If the Dogpatch isn't your cup of tea, there are many other neighborhoods that are much safer, cleaner, and pleasant to live in than SoMa or thereabouts.

This is exactly the issue. The city gets handed a goose that lays golden eggs and they completely wasted the opportunity. Then the goose dies and they're left floundering.

The analogy with Detroit is an apt one.

Dutch Disease

/r/sanfrancisco

Is still like that

There is nothing people hate more than the hand that feeds them. See also Brexit, the Southern US's attitude to the federal government.

>Southern US's attitude to the federal government.

People associate the US South with being poor. And it's true in that they get more federal dollars then pay, mostly from welfare. However the poverty rate in California beats out out every other state in the country.

If California keeps on its trend how long until jokes once about Mississippi or Alabama will instead have California as the punch line?

Maybe. Though of course Cali isn't the one voting to gut all those programs...

The cause of poverty in cali is different though. It’s mostly not lack of jobs. It’s unaffordable housing.

In much of the south it’s lack of good jobs.

The housing problem is easier to fix… not that cali is fixing it.

Mississippification is the term for what's been going on since Prop 13

The Californian poverty rate only beats out the south because Californian standards are way higher. Being poor in Mississippi is way worse than being in poverty in California, we might as well be talking about different countries at that point. This is just another dumb meme (that poor in California = poor in Mississippi, like poor in Switzerland = poor in Cambodia...uhm, no).

I encourage everyone to experience the Mississippi boonies filled with single wides and trash barrels in the back at least once in their lives. Then go check out poor places in California, just see what is really like for yourself.

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