The broken part is that there is third world-level poverty on the streets outside Google’s offices, working class people cannot afford to live in the Bay Area, and a fifth of California lives in poverty.
This same thing was observed during the Gold Rush in California in the 1800s; extreme wealth also resulted in extreme poverty. And there's a great way to solve this: tax the land and redistribute it equally to everyone. Land can't be moved, it's something that belongs to all of us, and you can't make more of it.
Economic land is any capital that has a fixed amount, that you can't make more of. When the local governments in the Bay Area started capping the amount of buildable square feet, they greatly accelerated inequality by converting regular living space and working space into economic land, just like the real land it sits upon.
This is why economic inequality skyrocketed so much. Rentierism resulted in so much being stolen from anybody who doesn't own the land, and blocks out so many people from even having access to the economic system.
In contrast when you have enormously wealthy people like Marc Andreessen fighting against higher density zoning there is no such excuse and it's pure greed. Nothing could actually be an existential disruption to the wealthy in the same way. There is no reason to listen to the rich like Andreessen at all.
The equitable thing would be to focus on redeveloping wealthy homeowner areas and limit redevelopment in areas occupied by poor renters, but somehow that option never seems to be on the table. Only the reverse.
If anything, these "tenant" groups only advocate for the interests of a small subset of tenants, those who have their forever home, and do so at the expense of tenants in general. It's "pure greed" too, at the expense of others in their same general social, economic, and political class!
I say this as someone who continues to advocate alongside tenant groups on policy for better protections, for rent registries, etc. And as someone who spent many years giving small donations to local tenant advocacy groups. At least Andreesen is transparent in his greed, and not hiding it. I regret all those years of donations to the groups that hurt people, but when it comes to the few good things they do I'll be there with them still. Marc Andreesen and the wealthy funders of "tenant" groups are not harmed at all by better tenant protection policy, but boy are they harmed if real power were handed back to tenants in the form of having enough housing, and therefore ultimate power over the landlords.
> They are nearly 100% funded by wealth foundations that have exactly the same motivations as Marc Andreesen, and the people carrying out the wishes of the wealthy foundations are merely woke-washing really bad behavior.These "tenant" groups fight the types of change that would redevelop wealthy areas, precisely because of their funding sources, and they do it just as hard if not harder than stopping housing going up in other areas.
Certainly not the case in my jurisdiction of Vancouver, where such political groups (eg. COPE) have explicitly advocated for apartment development in the wealthiest areas of the city. Maybe this is the case somewhere but a big [citation needed] here. If there are somewhere tenant advocacy orgs that aren't in favour of turning low density detached homes into apartments for workers that's certainly not one I recognize.
> If anything, these "tenant" groups only advocate for the interests of a small subset of tenants, those who have their forever home, and do so at the expense of tenants in general. It's "pure greed" too, at the expense of others in their same general social, economic, and political class!
Yes this is the point of my last comment. The solution is to increase the amount of people who have their forever home. The most equitable way to do that is to "destroy" the forever homes of the very rich for whom that is really no big disruptive deal, not to destroy the forever homes of the poor for whom it would be incredibly existentially disruptive. It is not "greedy" for people to want to keep their toehold on their long term home. To be clear the stakes here are not simply moving somewhere else but being priced out of the city entirely.
(I'm in agreement with the thesis of the article)
Read somewhere that SF spends roughly 50k$-80k$ per homeless person per year.
Taxing more doesn't solve a massively inefficient system at it's core. Just like US education, we spend more than any country on earth, why is it still bad?
Answering that question with a "if only we had more money" is a really poor argument. The CA tax fundamentals are bad, pooring more cash onto the fire will not fix that.
The population that's already living in those houses?
Note that "native-born Californians are ~37% of San Francisco County. That percentage has remained relatively flat over recent decades"
natural population change was positive in San Francisco County, CA, with births exceeding deaths by 574
I think it's more socialist/communist motivation to seize production I don't think they care about the rich as much as control.
In addition, there should probably be changes to laws/regulations to address companies that exploit the poorest.
And, many people who are poor have persistent mental/physical disabilities, so part of that spending is because many of these people have it the hardest.
With that said, we could likely fix all of these things and significantly unequal wealth distribution would still result in a lot of poverty.
Landlords could have collectively agreed to keep rents at $1K/month and not lobby against building more housing complexes, but they decided to be greedy instead.