Airport Exposes Class Divisions in Silicon Valley | Hacker News Reader

Airport Exposes Class Divisions in Silicon Valley

nytimes.com

27 pointsbrd52947 comments

SV transplant here. Grew up in suburban Chicago, now live in SF. Being surrounded by rich people all day is nice -- low crime, good water-cooler conversations with well-traveled, worldly, people, but there's a dark side: I'm having a harder and harder time relating to my family back in IL as time goes on.

In time, I imagine sociologists will study the affects of such insular communities on empathy, happiness, and many other dimensions of the human experience.

Same here.

European, used to an upper middle class lifestyle; went to grad school in a poor USA state, then moved to Menlo Park, CA. Pretty big shock during both transitions.

Now living in Oakland while working in SF downtown, so things are a bit more even :)

Sociologists have already been studying that. This "class separation" has been going on forever in countries with huge income inequalities.

There are way too many examples of what this leads too. None of them good. :(

Where is SF do you live? Everyone I know in the Mission speaks of rampant car break-ins and there are broken car windows all over the place. People literally shit on the streets.

Boulder, where I live, isn't as rich as San Francisco, but it doesn't have the poor areas either. I love it here, but I have to wonder what it be like to grow up in this bubble.

I've gotten very used to mountain views, lots of sunshine and short commutes.

The best way to remind me of how good I've got it is to invite friends from out of town to visit.

I live in Oakland and generally spend zero time here except either inside the condo or in a car driving to anywhere else.

I went to a local optometrist (who is surprisingly good); as far as I can tell, every patient who walked in was asking about Medi-Cal coverage or other government subsidy for the poor (which wasn't accepted, so they left). I'd far prefer to be around tech startup founders than the alternative, which is not "firefighters and teachers", but the poor and borderline homeless, it seems.

(I plan to move to Seattle or San Mateo County later this year; unclear if the benefits of Silicon Valley make up for the bogosity of California anymore.)

I don't appreciate the way the article vilifies the airport and its expansion. Airports may be used by the super rich, but they are also used by middle class workers as well. I make under six figures but still co-own a private aircraft and enjoy flying recreationally.

Furthermore, the new FBO on the airport would not displace any current residents (the displaced resident in the article lives in a complex planned for conversion into a business center). Instead, the new FBO would offer entry level employment, such as aircraft fueler and receptionist work, exactly the kind of thing the non-tech residents of SV should be calling for.

> “But I’m also going to try to talk to the guy at Facebook,” she said in the living room of her tidy two-room trailer, adding that she had read that the company’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, had recently established a political action committee for immigration reform. “He’s trying to help immigrants, and immigrants are here.”

I'm not sure if she's being sarcastic. I'm pretty sure Zuckerberg doesn't care about the immigrants in her trailer park. He cares about increasing the pool of skilled technical works, which would bring his costs down.

This type of thing is going on all over the country. If you play this out to its logical conclusion, none of the people that wealthy households depend on to maintain their lifestyles will be able to live near enough to the wealthy to provide those services. I guess someone better improve the Roomba and make a dish washing, laundry, and pool cleaning bot quickly.

I don't even know where you'd go in Chicago to pick up a private jet, and we're the third largest metro area in the country. Can you tell me more about the lifestyle support workers who can't afford to live near rich people here?

The fact is that SF and, to a lesser but still significant extent NYC, are hobbled in this respect by geography.

http://www.chicagotraveler.com/attractions/palwaukee-airport...

Next flight leaves...whenever you want it to.

Have you heard of O'Hare or Midway? [Formerly] Meigs Field? All of these can accomodate private aircraft.

In SF, I blame the high cost of living on misguided building over-regulation. If you have rising demand and a fixed supply of a good with inelastic demand, soon enough only the rich will be able to afford it.

Agreed, although there are new residences going in at Market and Noe, Market and Dolores, Market and Buchanan, A couple of huge ones (30 stories each?) near Market and 9th, More big ones on Mission and 8th. Those are just the ones I noticed driving around the last couple of weeks. I'm sure there are more, China Basin for example.

> If you play this out to its logical conclusion, none of the people that wealthy households depend on to maintain their lifestyles will be able to live near enough to the wealthy to provide those services.

Only if you prevent slums from forming. In order to do that, you need an influx of wealthy people that occupies all of the available land leaving nothing for the low-income communities.

I wouldn't describe most people who work at Facebook and Google as being upper class. They may earn above average when you look at all workers, but I think upper class is old money, privately education with independent wealth and social power. I don't think that describes most geeks.

Edit: I think in the US a Senator would be upper class, some random Google employee is probably middle-middle at best.

I think most people would consider a college educated person earning a low six-figure income to be upper middle class.

I'm from the UK, and I think here class has nothing to do with money. It has something to do with education, but more to do with background, especially family background, culture, taste, leisure activities and so on.

It also has a lot to do with our system of peerage and nobility. I don't think you're truly upper class unless you are elevated to the peerage or in some other way decorated.

In the UK you can be destitute but upper class, and a millionaire but still working class.

Sounds a lot like a caste system

Americans (I am one) have the fantasy of a classless society, but we're every bit as class-oriented a society as India or the UK. It took me years to fully realize this.

The definition of social classes differ between Europe and the US; and there's also far less consensus on the US definition.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_upper_class

So if it's just about money, what would you call a fifth generation Baronet who was educated at Eton and Oxford, served as an officer in a prestigious Army regiment, listens to Radio 4, reads the Telegraph, never watches TV and likes to walk in the country, but happens to be poor in his old age? It's insane to call him working class, just because he's poor. Just like it's insane to call someone like David Beckham upper class - everything about the man is still working class.

Careful, you're showing your status by failing to read the article, respond to the points made in the post, or comprehend the basic idea that class delineations vary between cultures.

We don't call the "fifth generation Baronet" anything because, frankly, virtually no one of any class in the US cares.

In America, such a person would probably be called "retired", no different from someone who worked for 40 years in a factory before retiring to live on social security (= small government-provided pension). Being educated at a fancy school doesn't matter unless you're looking for a job in particular industries. A military career can earn some respect, but definitely not prestige.

I don't see either of your hypotheticals as "insane". Of course you call a rich guy "upper class", no matter how he acts, and a poor guy not, no matter how refined his background.

Wow - that is so totally different to how we look at class in the UK. I think what I'm thinking of the class divide, you might call the old-money, new-money divide.

Sounds about right to me. I'm not sure if "old money" could be applied when the money is gone, but I wouldn't rule it out.

Most Americans would call him poor (or retired) and Beckham rich.

The social signifiers Americans would recognize distinguish between the main groupings of people who work for a living: working class, middle class, and professionals. On either side of that are the rich and the poor. Take a poor person, give them a lot of money and they become rich. Their interests, habits, or speech are irrelevant.

Some rich Americans who happen to have inherited their money distinguish themselves from outsiders through affections related to clothing and habits. The vast majority of their fellow citizens would not even recognize most of what this group regards as markers of group status, any more than they would be able to distinguish between this or that gang sign.

America's original sin is slavery. Skin color was a quite simple way to distinguish between castes, so there was no reason to develop the mannerisms that became important in Britain. Someone studying acting in the UK will likely spend a tremendous amount of time on voice, so they can navigate the complexities of representing a variety of classes. It's not accidental that Americans are more noted for a much more inwardly focused "method".

what would you call a fifth generation Baronet who was educated at Eton and Oxford, served as an officer in a prestigious Army regiment, listens to Radio 4, reads the Telegraph, never watches TV and likes to walk in the country ...?

British. Very, very British.

If you are dependent on a paycheck from an employer to pay your bills (either as a regular employee or a contractor), and your annual pay isn't enough that you could, in principle, invest the surplus above the median income over your expected career and be able to live indefinitely at near-median income off the proceeds of that investment as passive recipient (IOW, if you work for a living and aren't something like a top-rank pro athlete or someone with similar pay), its probably safe to say that you are at best upper-middle class.

The upper class are the people that live comfortably off of capital (or have the resources where they could do so, in principle, even if instead they choose to consume their seed corn and don't.) They are the people that, if they have jobs, have no need to have fear of losing them, not because its easy to find another one (as might be the case for many elite workers), but because they don't really need the first one.

There was a post last month where the comments went into how the wealthy don't consider themselves "upper class". One fellow said he had $8M in investments but did not feel "upper class" due to lack of influence/respect.

Completely oblivious to the fact that he could cash out the investments, never work again and still be in the top 20% income bracket.

Here is how to become middle class. Go to school, get good grades, get a job.

Here is how to become "upper class". Get a pile of money. Stop working. Start accumulating influence and respect.

The $8M dollar working man is like a grad student who never leaves school. He keeps accumulating little bits of paper that say how awesome he is, but are worthless in the larger game. He never moves onto the next step.

Oh, and if you can't figure out how to gain influence/respect, get out of the Valley. You are a medium-sized fish in a giant pond. Find a smaller pond. Throw a dart at a US map, move to that town. Buy every piece of land that goes up for sale. Get involved in local politics, the Zoning Board will probably have the best results. Hire people and build your dream.

By the traditional definitions, you have the lower class (proletariat), middle class (bourgeoisie), and upper class (aristocracy). People who work for someone else--in exchange for a wage meted out by that someone else--are lower class, no matter how high-up they are in their particular organization. Business owners (though this includes freelancers) form the middle class. People who have enough power to control the rules by which capital is allocated in the economy (and thereby basically have unlimited wealth, in a sense) are upper class. This used to be royalty, and those who could afford to spend all day bowing and scraping to them; in the modern day, it's congress, and the leaders of the industries who can afford to lobby them.

Interestingly, this class structure has been "rediscovered" in modern-day discourse, in the form of the MacLeod corporate hierarchy. It's harder to recognize within the context of a single corporation, but when you analyze, say, all of Silicon Valley in those terms (http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/tag/vcistan/), the class-structure leaps right out.

> By the traditional definitions, you have the lower class (proletariat), middle class (bourgeoisie), and upper class (aristocracy). People who work for someone else--in exchange for a wage meted out by that someone else--are lower class, no matter how high-up they are in their particular organization.

The "traditional" scheme I'm most familiar with has the proletariat, the petit bourgeosie, and the haute borgeoisie; that is, the post-aristocratic system used in 19th century discussions of capitalist society. The petit bourgeosie includes both what would, in modern terms, be elite and white collar workers (technical experts, managers, etc.) and small business owners (who may technically be 'capitalist', but are nevertheless are dependent largely on their own labor for support even if it is not wage labor), while the haute bourgeousie are the major capitalists.

Both the proletariat (lower class) and much of the petit bourgeosie (middle class) work at wage labor, and the proletariat and the whole of the petit bourgeosie are dependent on their ability to find a market for their labor for their living. The haute bourgeosie corresponds very closely to how you describe the aristocracy, but the distinction between the proletariat and the petit bourgeosie is not at the point where your description draws the line between the proletariat and the bourgeosie; business ownership isn't the sine qua non of the middle class.

>>> Completely oblivious to the fact that he could cash out the investments, never work again and still be in the top 20% income bracket.

All fun and well until he needs medical treatment.

Class is about power and influence. When everyone has two houses, a boat, and three cars, favors (political favors, jobs for kids at their parents' friends' companies) are the de facto currency.

People who earn a paycheck aren't upper class.

Fine: they are almost certainly rising-upper-middle-class. Which is far different from working-class, or service-class. The point of the article is that, because of the frenzy for housing, and the absolute inability of Silicon Valley to allow high-density housing, teachers, manufacturers, and other laborers are being priced out of the community. Which will mean worse quality of life for higher pay: people will need to commute 1.5 hrs+ to get to $15/hr jobs instead of $10/hr jobs, though their take home pay (after commuting costs) will be about the same. Which is a really shitty situation, for everyone in the community. The solution is to stop having such restrictive zoning laws, and allow high-rises in the Valley.

If a spectrum of measurement seems to generally fit a problem-space, but you're having problems putting names to the categories you've got (or the converse, everything you try to categorize seems to straddle one of the lines), you've probably sliced the spectrum up at the wrong points.

In this case, I recall an article (a chapter from a book, actually) that distinguished five or six separate social classes which exist in the US, and went into incredible detail about what makes someone fit into one or another of them. They felt pretty natural, both less politicized and easier to recognize by mannerism/belief/dress.

Ah, found it (the source was down, but I had a copy saved): https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/47375701/An_Anatomy_of_t...

Nope. Next question.

The cheeky mods have changed the title, so your comment no longer makes any sense.

The original title was: Is there room for a middle class in Silicon Valley?

I think it's an important question, and if the answer is "no" what can we do about it? It was this line of the article that resonated with me: "We are becoming a community where our teachers, our police, our firefighters, our nurses, they can’t live with us. They have to come in from other places. Healthy communities have all these people living together."

It seems terribly unhealthy to exclude the folks who provide vital and valuable services to a community from living in it.

What does "unhealthy" in this context mean?

Aristocracy is the norm for human civilization. I don't get why people are so chicken little about it. When your citizens are disgustingly wealthy they aren't going to have trouble buying those things.

Use sacbee to look up how much police officers make in the area. Hint, a hell of a lot more then I do as a programmer with 10+ years of experience. Hell, that campus police officer that pepper sprayed those kids at Berkeley makes 6 figures.

Back when SFPD was short staffed there used to be a billboard advertising $91,000 starting salary for new recruits.

It's probably at least as interesting to realize that a "CEO/Founder" feels there is no room for a middle class, even if he's based in Sacramento.

Didn't like it, and it's why I left: wanted to be in an area where normal humans could raise a family without crushing themselves with unpayable debts and soul-sapping commutes.

Newman!

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