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Comment by drewda | Hacker News Reader

That SF's payroll tax exemption was specifically created for Twitter: https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/twitter-will-get-pa...

Here's one summary of it as of last year:

> The infamous "Twitter tax break" provided by former Mayor Ed Lee to lure companies, including Twitter, to mid-Market by exempting them from a portion of their payroll taxes, had its sunset in 2019. Many argued that it did little to revitalize mid-Market — and certainly Twitter former fancy cafeteria didn't help in terms of workers spending money at local businesses — and it just ended up costing the city about $10 million a year in lost revenue. > https://sfist.com/2023/02/09/mayor-london-breed-announces-ta...

When the Twitter tax break expired in 2019, the Chronicle also did a pretty thorough survey of the mixed effects: https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2019/mid-market/

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I worked in mid-market/the TL from 2014 until 2017. The tech companies sort of helped. A handful of hip restaurants and bars sprung up, but the city never really dealt with the homeless. There are a lot of non-profits serving the homeless in the TL, and there wasn't really anywhere for them to go as an alternative.

>> $10 million a year in lost revenue

That's 1.5% of the homeless budget.

Wow. I had to fact-check this. Wow.

https://www.hoover.org/research/despite-spending-11-billion-...

> San Francisco is slightly smaller than Jacksonville, Florida. Yet San Francisco’s homelessness budget—$1.1 billion in fiscal year 2021–22—is nearly 80 percent of Jacksonville’s entire city budget.

This really looks like someone is stealing money. There is no way it costs that much

SF tried to build a $1.7M toilet.

https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/san-francisco-publ...

I'm really curious if there has been a comprehensive study on incentive corporate tax breaks like these. It has become my understanding that these are rarely worth it.

Reminds me on this very interesting video on the subject focusing on Louisiana (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWTic9btP38)

A tax on gross receipts is going to discourage any big business from locating in the city. You shouldn't ask "what incentive of these tax breaks" are, but rather "was it worth have Twitter/Google/Stripe/... downtown" or not.

> $10 million a year in lost revenue

This assumes that the company would be based on the city regardless. It's very common to see these assumptions in news articles about tax breaks, and it never makes sense.

I dealt with the Twitter office move stuff and there was a real honest to goodness push to get is to love to an office in South San Francisco so we could avaint the payroll tax and have parking. Had it not been for the tax break I suspect they would have left SF completely.

Yes it's a thing people do. We tax oil and cigarettes and people understand it makes people not want to buy oil and cigarettes anymore. Tax something good like working in SF, people don't seem to understand it has the same effect.

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