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Comment by spaniard89277 | Hacker News Reader

Sillicon Valley pulls you in because the amazing career opportunities you have there, and pushes you out because of the insane land/housing situation, and how everyone around you who's not IT is miserable.

It's "funny" to see how many places that deem themselves a progressive yet they fail so hard to tackle the very basics of poverty.

Living in a place where I can get 200k as a white collar while many others have to live in tents because despite being workers can't afford more, it's my idea of dystopia.

An average blue collar should be able to afford rent or buy a small place. If that's not possible in the place you live in, then you're living in a dystopian place.

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I have had a number of discussions from long time Mountain View homeowners who lived there from before Google and LinkedIn. Although the value of their real estate has exploded, they all said that quality of life has gone way down. It was a nicer place to just live when most people worked at Moffett Field or the associated aerospace and defense contractors.

Decentralization of the tech industry (particularly software) is a great trend so that young people who want to build a career won't be forced to move to Silicon Valley. Unless someone has strong personal ties there or gets a really lucrative job offer they should look to other regions.

> young people who want to build a career won't be forced to move to Silicon Valley

RO recent-college grads are highly constrained in terms of upward mobility. You don’t get the network. You don’t get the camaraderie. It’s great for employers but bad for the ambitious.

This requires a revamping of property rights as popularly conceived across many countries (which is not a bad thing, just takes time). In general I can buy just about anything you legally own without going through extra red tape. But now we'd need laws saying that even if I offer you $1M for a home you can only take $500k, because that's one of the reasons why you can be priced out of an area. We also can't allow cash transactions for many things because then we wouldn't know how much you paid.

And we'd need to extend this beyond housing. Just because I'm willing to pay $12 for eggs doesn't mean you should be able to charge or receive that much as the supermarket.

Perhaps when businesses raise prices they have to write an essay about the legitimate justifications for such increases.

As someone who has lived in SF for 13 years and loves it, 100% agree. So much preventable human misery here.

SF spends $100k per homeless person per year. Preventable is easier said than done, unfortunately.

SF literally has a homeless industrial complex. There's a network of non-profits that siphons billions of tax payer dollars to "fix homelessness".

If they really cared about preventing homelessness, they would pass rent control legislation. Every other western nation has figured this out, if you provide basic (and relatively cheap) safety nets around housing, you don't have thousands new homeless people a year.

Instead they choose to waste taxpayer money to buy London Breed's donors another house in Sonoma

Broad rent control protections were passed in San Francisco in 1979, and statewide in 2019, and has lead to more misery over housing by slumlords than if there was no rent control. Landlords have zero incentive to improve their properties, so the number of people I know that are living in cheap, but substandard apartments (eg heating is non-functional) is too many. And even if you get rent control so you can continue on affording rent, if the burrito place charges $8 which then increases to $12 with inflation, the budget you have that's counting on $4 burrito means you still have to move away.

Again, non-US western nations have figured this out by providing tenant rights (rent control included in this).

Slumlords can and should be legislated out of existence.

> if the burrito place charges $8 which then increases to $12 with inflation

Where do you think this inflation comes from? If not from uncontrolled rental price increases?

San Francisco has tenant rights (rent control included in this). What rights do you think San Francisco tenants are missing?

Inflation in the cost of food has many sources, among them, the cost of the food ingredients, and increase in minimum wage paid to employees to make said food are the two other large ones to factor into the cost of food.

> Slumlords can and should be legislated out of existence.

This is the prevailing liberal thought these days... the government should be in charge of housing completely.

The California Department of Housing and Community Development is beginning to address this problem but it’ll take years until a noticeable difference is made.

https://www.hcd.ca.gov/sites/default/files/docs/policy-and-r...

VC is subsidizing SF realty and NIMBYism.

The one thing they should have learned post-pandemic is that talent is global.

Tech workers can work their asses off remotely. Figjam is better than a whiteboard. Home offices are less distracting than open offices. If you hire the right people, they'll work even harder from home.

> one thing they should have learned post-pandemic is that talent is global

All business is bundling and unbundling. There are reams of tech workers presently working remote who have proven their work can be done cheaper offshore. On the other hand, there are offshore and remote-only businesses constrained by their model who are advertising opportunity proximate to themselves. Anyone convinced the world will be remote only (or RTO for all) is begging to be disrupted.

> there are offshore and remote-only businesses constrained by their model who are advertising opportunity proximate to themselves.

What?

> Anyone convinced the world will be remote only (or RTO for all) is begging to be disrupted.

I don't think we've established any evidence for this.

I may just be old and jaded but I don't think most people that call themselves progressive are progressive at all. I see two main camps dominating the progressive movement these days and they could broadly be grouped as butthurt marxists and "I support the latest thing (because I am consciously or subconsciously working for my own interests from a libertarian bent)". The butthurt marxists bought the insane idea that critical theory is capable of uncovering any sort of knowledge and applied it outside of class to other groups that might help them tear the whole world down and so like suffering because it creates people with nothing to lose to support their destructive cause. The libertarians just want to keep amassing wealth and don't see the obvious outcome of capitalism is market power exploitation through oligopoly/monopoly because it is in their interest not to see this (because the solution is break up companies with market power so smaller companies can compete vigorously). Both these groups say they care about the median person/family but both of these groups have incentive to make things worse for the median person/family and I see no reason anyone should think being labelled a progressive is a good thing anymore. Instead support individual liberty strongly tempered by market power mitigation more akin to what the USA was doing in the 50's and 60's agressively breaking up larger companies abusing oligopolies/monopolies.

I think you're looking for distributism and georgism.

I am definitely not looking for georgism or distriutism because the butthurt marxist camp are definitely marxist in origin because the stuff the espouse is definitely marxist in origin, just generalized to other arbitrary dichotomies (race,sex, gender, etc) and put through a critical theory lense to come to the same incorrect conclusiin they always come to, destroy the current system because it is oppressing the utopia. The libertarians are definitely libertarian by their own profession as well.

I am also not advicating for either of thise systems because i do t care how concentrated capital gets except for the situation where the accumulation gets to be so much that it allows the holder to exercise market power to exclude competition among other negative things that push prices above marginal cost. It is very market specific.

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