Hacker News Reader

Comment by wheels | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, was looking to see if this comment existed. Sao Paolo feels like one of the richest cities in the world surrounded by one of the poorest cities in the world. I've been to more than 50 countries and hundreds of big cities, and Sao Paolo feels like it has the craziest gradient between rich and poor. I'm not even sure San Francisco would make the top 10.

(High up would be: Sao Paolo, Rio, Bangalore, Mexico City, Johannesburg, Riyadh, ...)

View on HN

Lagos is also high up there... Had some friends basically get robbed by the police on their first night in town. :p

Haven't been, but would have expected such from things I've heard. But corruption and inequality to a large extent vary independently. There's some correlation, but not as much as one might expect. Case in point: the Balkans are very corrupt, but inequality isn't especially high.

Maybe the Balkans just didn't have the time to reach those levels yet, because the tendency is there. Case in point, Romania, where more and more pieces of land (city, national parks, whatever) get fenced off and used for the whims of the ruling kleptocracy, while (certain) suburbs are decaying year after year by every indicator.

Romania is actually the least corrupt Balkan country (if one counts them as Balkan). In my experience, former east-block countries tend to have high corruption, but relatively good infrastructure and relatively low inequality. They're fairly unique in where they sit on the development ladder, because it seems like quashing corruption is the major missing piece to reaching prosperity. (Whereas in many / most poor countries, there's a lack of intellectual capital, and solving education and growing the professional sector is at best a multi-generational project.)

SF isn't Haiti but it is in decline. It's sad because it was so cool back in the 1990's and 2000's.

I think the counterintuitive thing about bringing up Brazilian cities here is that central Sao Paolo (where just the central part has about 3x the population of San Francisco) feels richer than San Francisco. And the favelas on the edges, which have a population larger than the whole Bay Area, feel poorer than almost anywhere in the world, with nowhere in the US that can hold a candle to such. And just the favelas of Sao Paolo have a population larger than most US states.

Cities wax and wane. SF boomed from the gold rush, 1880s-1906, 1920s, 1940s, 60s, and as you noted, dot com period. In between it’s varied from stasis (1870s, 50s) to quite grim (30s, 80s — the latter much worse than today).

The swings in Silicon Valley and other parts of the Bay Area have been much less extreme in these regards. Most of the wealth is in the Valley, just more diffuse and harder to see.

Yeah, it still sucks though. The US is going through a slump and it really shows in some of our major cities.

> The US is going through a slump

The US economy is growing gangbusters but 40+ years of "Reagan revolution" have really taken their toll. That ideology has infused many with the belief that if something is broken it should not be fixed; rather that its problems mean that further intervention will simply make things worse.

Even SF, that supposed "liberal" city (whatever that means), suffers from this sickness.

Yeah I guess that's what I mean. The US economy is doing well but not good. I feel like people have less these days. Business is great but the middle class is evaporating. For the average worker it seems pointless to engage with our great economy. Incentives are all out of whack.

Riyadh is dangerous and has a clear gradient between the poor and the rich?

I stayed in the Al Bat'ha district when I was there, where there were virtually no short-term visitors (can't say "tourists" since Saudi Arabia didn't have tourist visas; I was speaking at a conference, but stayed for an extra week). It never felt dangerous, but there was a massive gap between ritzy central Riyadh and the market district. Close to half of the population of Riyad are guest workers with limited rights and low salaries; I can't remember if that seemed to be the reason for the gap. This was also 20 years ago, so I don't have any sense for how it's developed since, but I'd be surprised if it has changed.

20 years ago? Man Riyadh is a completely different city now, even locals from other cities can't believe how much it has changed.

This the first result from a quick search about it https://www.visitsaudi.com/en/see-do/destinations/riyadh

And the 40% of the city that are Desi immigrants also enjoy that improvement? There were very nice things in the city 20 years ago (and all of the cities I listed); they just weren't available to a major chunk of the population. I'm skeptical that that part has changed in Riyadh?

Things did definitely improve for them though the gap remains. Still, the gap does not mean it’s dangerous. I haven’t been to Riadh but if it’s similar to Doha/Dubai, then you can walk into a worker’s neighborhood at anytime with no consequences.

What happened to you in Bangalore?

Nothing. To be clear, I wasn't talking about actual danger, as much as the felt gradients in rich and poor between the places, often in a small distance. And the gap between, say, the Infosys campus, and bits of Bangalore only a couple kilometers away is huge. Kind of the GINI of a city...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com