Protesters Smash Google Shuttle Bus Piñata In Fight Against Rent Increases
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It seems weird for the writer to try to separate himself from this. The mission starting gentrifying well before 2010, there was just a bit of a lull at the end of the last decade. Not to put too fine a point on it, but he's a white stanford-grad who covers the tech industry for a website. Even if you're a poor recent college graduate with five roommates, your presence changes the character of the neighborhood.
New units are not subject to rent control, but if you don't move, then you will never really pay much more for rent. People in my building pay 50% what I pay for the same layout, and new people will probably pay 2x what I am paying for the same layout as well.
Commercial property tho doesnt have rent control however. But that's kind of a different argument, right?
What? SF is infested by rent-controlled buildings. Rent control is the most tenant-hostile policy ever invented. It basically means that newcomers (or people who had to move) are subsidizing ridiculous rents of those who haven't moved in a while. Rent control restricts the freedom of movement.
My barber pays $1600 for a 2br apartment two blocks from the my building where a shitty 1br got rented within an hour after showing up on craigslist. The very same 1br was $2,400 just a year ago, and $2,200 two years ago.
But they still generally pay far, far less property tax than they should:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(1978...
Or maybe California could relax its constitutional restriction on city and county income taxes, which would make much more sense than relying on random benefactors to make the city more livable.
How far back do they want to go? Protesting in front of Tim Berners-Lee's house for being an enabling force in the creation of the technology that runs Google and other companies?
People are having a go at nerds because they can. The scales of social status haven't changed since high school, but it turns out that nerds can earn a good salary, and in the "fascist" free market economy, this means they can live where they like, and the police will even protect them!
I wish I knew about this so I could show up in my Google sweater.
I disagree very much with your notion that this is people pummeling at nerds because of some remnant of high school social pecking order, but please don't do this.
This is the corner of 16th and Mission. The local police station is literally two blocks away and still have zero control over this intersection. It is a mad house. It is the Mos Eisley of San Francisco.
The level of class warfare (from both sides) in the Mission is pretty intense, and the area is already a bit lawless to the point where the police have little control over an open-air drug den just two blocks from the station house. You don't fuck around with that intersection, the cops can't protect you well there, and everyone knows it.
And there seems to be a discrepancy between the extreme danger you claim I would be in, and the claims of other people that this is a harmless gathering. Can you shed some light on this? No sarcasm intended there, I really am surprised by how you characterize the situation because in my experience, no one provoking left wingers is ever in serious danger.
Keep in mind what happened the last time there was an anti-gentrification protest in the Mission. Ostensibly it's a peaceful gathering to march against gentrification. It turned into smashing windows of local independent businesses and massive vandalism.
Every leftist protest or demonstration in San Francisco seems to have a bad habit of turning violent. This isn't to say that everyone there is violent, or that their cause isn't worthwhile, but rather that if you see these marches or protests, the Black Bloc is always close at hand, so I'd watch right the fuck out.
> "I would be very surprised if the people involved in an open air drug den had much to do with the people attending and organizing this protest."
There's not much of an intersection. The whole open-air drug den thing isn't to associate the protesters with the crackheads of the neighborhood, but rather to say that this isn't like any street corner in San Francisco. This is a street corner that the police effectively have no control over. If you get jumped by a Black Bloc asshole with a bone to pick with Googlers, you are fending for yourself. Though, reading the article, it looks like the cops were on hand for this one, which is a nice change for the corner of 16th and Mission.
All in all, don't be so cavalier with your own safety. While San Francisco isn't ruled by the Khmer Rouge, the Mission is not a safe neighborhood. Don't let the bistros and boutique coffee shops fool you. If you mind your own business you'll be fine. If you go looking for trouble, the Mission has no problem delivering trouble to your face, fast.
However, what you say makes the complaints by the protesters about the heavy police presence seem ridiculous: it cannot be the case that this protest is "peaceful" and yet anyone present who appears to be against hem would be in serious danger.
I feel very much that the Black Bloc and anarchist protesters that infest every cause and protest in San Francisco is a huge part of why the city is the way it is. Otherwise legitimate, worthwhile causes can garner no public support because a highly visible minority of their base takes every chance they get to smash shit up. They become politically untenable to support for city politicians lest they look like they are soft on crime - because protesting is synonymous with crime thanks to these people. They also drive away moderates as no one really wants to be caught on the wrong side of a riot (is there a right side to being in a riot?).
Police breaking up a non-violent protest of only 40 people... yes, that's the definition of oppression. I don't like what you have to say so I'll shut you up is oppression.
Have you ever read your constitution? These people are douchebags, but what they were doing should not have been stopped.
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What you should be worried about is groups of people angry at groups of people. Protests, jostling, fights, deaths.
Showing up in your Google sweater is just fanning the flames, irresponsible and unempathetic. These people have a problem, and it's real to them. You might want to keep that sweater at the bottom of a drawer, lest it get caught on a pitchfork and burned by a torch. I'll feel sorry for you (I will) as you unjustly burn.
If it's true that these people have organized an event where someone would be physically assaulted for wearing a Google sweater (if there were no police there) then that's precisely why I would want to do it. People have a right to express themselves, they don't have a right to make other people feel unsafe.
Why does the fact that these people are upset make their cause any more just? Why do my rights (and more importantly the rights of any tech employees who might happen to pass through there) end where their feelings begin?
Also, how sympathetic would you feel towards a Black man who "antagonized" white people by passing through a White neighborhood, and was attacked by Whites who were already upset by the civil rights movement.
These people are upset with change. Hard luck to them, I never said their cause was just. But you antagonising them has nothing to do with anything but your own amusement. I wouldn't condone physical violence for you wearing a particular sweater - and if you notice, I never suggested that I did. I merely used your high-horse dismissive language against you: I would be unsympathetic to you should you run into trouble. If you went out of your way to antagonise aggressive, upset people just for your own jollies, I'm not going to coddle you and say "there there, poor guy, those mean protesters".
If a kid sticks a knife into a power socket and gets seriously hurt, I'll be sympathetic. But if an adult does a Jackass-style "won't this be fun!" version and gets seriously hurt, no, I won't be sympathetic. I'll call an ambulance and apply first aid, but why should I care how that adult feels because they got hurt knowingly doing something stupid?
Also, how sympathetic would you feel towards a Black man who "antagonized" white people by passing through a White neighborhood
"I wish I knew about this [so I could go and antagonise them]" is not merely 'passing through'.
I meant it in the sense of being unsympathetic towards an opinion (the opinion that there is something unjust about gentrification) not towards the alleged victims of gentrification.
My aim is to express an opinion: That tech workers have a right to live where they want to, and that it's not the right of the local community, or people claiming to represent them, to stop them living where they choose to and frequenting the businesses they choose to.
Now this might be upsetting to people who think of themselves as victims of gentrification, but I didn't formulate this viewpoint for the purpose of upsetting them. If I have to change my viewpoint, or choose not to express it, because someone finds it upsetting, then that is not freedom of speech.
So unless you think that people should be forced to curtail their speech and keep their opinions to themselves, whenever that opinion is offensive to someone who has (or feels they have) suffered some ill fortune, you should stop comparing what I proposed to do with willfully inciting violence towards myself.
I don't think you really understand that "freedom of speech" refers to the actions of the government. It has nothing to do with what private citizens do in response to what you say. The first amendment doesn't protect you from blowback and it's not supposed to. Freedom of speech is not freedom from criticism.
However if you consider freedom of speech an issue between citizens, wouldn't the right to bear arms be the greatest enemy of freedom of speech? Seems like "an armed society is a polite society" is a recipe for a society where nobody speaks their mind for fear of losing their life...
"The first amendment doesn't protect you from blowback and it's not supposed to."
Correct that is what the criminal code, and the fascist police, are for.
"Freedom of speech is not freedom from criticism."
This discussion is about violence, not criticism.
"However if you consider freedom of speech an issue between citizens, wouldn't the right to bear arms be the greatest enemy of freedom of speech? Seems like "an armed society is a polite society" is a recipe for a society where nobody speaks their mind for fear of losing their life..."
Possibly though I haven't heard of someone getting shot for expressing an opinion. Most people are afraid to go to jail for murder, while leftists who push and shove rarely even get charged.
You can get rid of the buses with a law, but then people will just drive or use other transportation, which causes traffic problems.
If you were to remove many of the laws restricting redevelopment and the construction of tall buildings, everyone would benefit - property owners, property developers, tenants, local stores, rich people, poor people, the government, etc.
Also, some more integrated policies would help; the ridiculous fragmentation of municipal governments and transit districts doesn't improve the situation. Why are BART, Muni, Caltrain, AC Transit, and the VTA run in such an uncoordinated manner? Why doesn't BART go down the peninsula? Why are there miles of light rail in the middle of nowhere in Santa Clara County, but not in more dense areas? Why is there no higher-density housing near the Caltrain stations in places like Palo Alto?
Maybe you could securitize the value of the tenant's rent control, entitling an exiting tenant to a windfall if they are replaced by a higher-rent paying replacement? This would be on the theory that residential property values are an externality created by the people living there.
Can you clarify how this is different from simply prohibiting rental, forcing residents to own their apartment? A securitized right to property value increases sounds a lot like equity.
edit: Oh I'm stupid. Clearly you mean all of this under price control: the renter gets the benefits of equity, without paying anything for them, and without taking on any risk of ownership (like property values collapsing). A complete soup of misincentives and disaster.
The difference between owning and renting is already a matter of degrees, particularly once you add rent control, mortgages, condos and HOAs into the mix. The renter already has the right to deprive the owner of the property value increase, this is just creating a legal framework to give it back for cash. I'm imagining it would only be part of the value of increase in rent over the rent-control limit, not all of it.
It would increase market price rents modestly, as you're essentially depriving landlords of the power to shake off bad tenants by finding rent control loopholes or waiting them out, but you could offset that by creating a process for voluntary tenant buyouts.
Buyouts are currently very difficult to carry out legally even if the tenant wants to leave and the landlord would rather replace them with someone paying more, leaving the two parties stuck together in an unhappy marriage as an unintended side effect of the way the laws work.
In response to your edit: Of course you'd pay for them, new rentals are market-priced (then locked into rent control until that tenant leaves), aren't they? It's got one-sided risk like any option but those aren't hard to price. It's in everyone's interest to increase the future value of the rental unit.
Nobody seems to complain that the housing market in SF is on fire for the same reasons that rents are up.
Even if you can afford to buy a house, it's damn near impossible to find one because sellers are getting many offers on the first day/week (a lot of which are in cash). And a lot of these offers aren't from homeowners, but rather investment companies. There was a good article in the SJ Mercury News last month about it [1]. Even if you want a house (and can afford one), the market just doesn't have enough supply, so people are then stuck renting. It really is a pretty big problem.
[1] http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_22930687/bay-areas-av...
And I live on the other side of the world, where house prices are too high, it causes massive problems, and nobody complains about it.
In fact prices in my suburb are about twice what they seem to be in parts of SF where it is quite safe to live:
http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/720-722-34th-Ave-San-Franc...
Here a big fall in house prices is seen as a risk rather than a good thing.
This has unfortunately been the case since the WTO protests in Seattle in late 1999.
Probably a moot point but do those new bars and cafes provide jobs? Do these people tip more or less than those who used to frequent the 'Cheap eateries' ?
I am sympathetic to the challenges of having a neighborhood go from affordable to "hip" (and not affordable) but does this bring more disposable income into San Francisco and increase the available money supply or not?
[1] http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/11/san_francisco...
Most residents of San Francisco -- homeless, tech, lower-income, whatever -- want absolutely nothing to change except for what makes them happier. And in most cases, the loudest, wealthiest, Pac Heights/Sea Cliff voices want the "charm" of San Francisco to stay the same. Meanwhile, it's one of the most undesirable places to merely walk around that I've come across in my life, and I only work in the city because I have to. I will never move to the city.
Some of the comments are already popping up on TechCrunch; "do you want SF to be the next NYC?" My answer to that is abso-fucking-lutely. New York City is perfectly suited to dense living without gritting your teeth; the subways run 24/7, the risk of stepping in homeless shit is significantly lower, there are very few places in NYC that make me cringe as much as the TL after sundown, the varying cultures get along and complement each other instead of beating Google Bus piñatas at a dirty-ass BART station...
If San Francisco slowly became the next New York City I'd be pleased as a peach. (Imagine NYC with SF's weather!) But it will never happen in our lifetimes. Honestly, I think it's a California thing, because L.A. has a better shot at it and that's not going to happen either.
I hear that. Every time I come to SF I'm reminded of why I never want to live there (I live in Seattle).
> "do you want SF to be the next NYC?"
+1.
Frankly, I see a lot of the same shit (not literally, but you get the idea) here in Seattle, and I find it incredibly disappointing. There's constant hand-wringing about the lack of affordable housing, but the minute solutions are proposed, all of the once-upon-a-time hand-wringers vociferously cry out "Not in my backyard!"
The NIMBYism has to stop. I can only hope that as people in their 20s grow older and turn into those louder, wealthier voices, that they remember just how much it sucked for them to live in a city that didn't properly increase population density when it should've.
How so? I know the city only as a tourist, and in that capacity thought it pretty pleasant to walk through.
Politically, San Francisco will never be New York: New York incorporates its own suburbs, and the outer boroughs can outvote Manhattan.
On one side you have old streetcars, cable cars, cute restaurants, tourist traps, and wide sidewalks.
On the other side you have extreme poverty, homelessness, gang wars, a huge violent crime problem, literal shit and piss in the streets, and enough race and class tension to cut with a knife.
The two seldom cross, but they do sometimes. The southern end of the Powell cable car stop is one such place. Walk just a teensy bit further west along Market and you will notice a complete collapse of the city. In the Union Square area head just a few blocks west and you will be in the middle of the Tenderloin, which is the infamous heart of unsavory and disgusting things that happen in the city.
More adventurous tourists that don't rely strictly on the most standard guides will also get to see the other side of the city. Find your way down to El Farolito in the Mission for their famous tacos and burritos? Welcome, you're now in contested gang territory where randoms get shot as part of gang initiations.
It's a puzzling city. I lived there for a year, and while I enjoyed a lot of it, my overall impression was deeply negative.
I used to love to go to the Roxie Theater in the Mission, where they showed movies you might never encounter otherwise. During a retrospective for some anniversary of a Friedkin film, the great director himself just came walking up the sidewalk right through his speechless fans.
On the other hand, I have been stuck in traffic on Mission near 17th while the SFPD put down rows of little yellow numbered plastic cones across three lanes of traffic -- one for each shell casing.
Is there any public transit facility less welcoming than the urine-drenched BART station slash homeless zoo at 16th? Yes, actually. Just pop down to 24th, if you dare.
Heroin dealers used to turn little alleys off of 26th into open-air markets in the wee hours. Maybe they still do.
I just can't bring myself to visit the Mission anymore.
The Mission is very different to visit vs. to live in. It reminds me slightly of Belltown in Seattle - nice to visit, kind of shitty to live in. If you're just there on Thursday nights a lot of the awfulness of the neighborhood fails to bother you.
Catching a giant whiff of shit and piss coming out of the BART station you can shrug off when it's once in a while, especially when you're on the way to a good night out. When it's every single day, to and from work, all hours of the day, it becomes tiresome. When you pass by a homeless dude passed out (maybe dead? who knows) on the sidewalk you can shrug it off, but when you see him slumped over every day on your way to work it starts digging at you. When you hear about some poor Mexican kid who got shot as part of a gang initiation, you can think "how terrible" and get on with your day... when you see the street-side memorials, and then you see another a week later, and then another, it becomes different.
The Mission is a different beast when you live there vs. just visit. If you decide to cocoon yourself strictly in the heavily gentrified western border of the Mission (because let's be honest, the Valencia corridor is a tiny sliver of the Mission), you will never have to deal with any of it. For many people though, the Mission includes everything east of Mission St also ;)
Not to mention, once you leave the bar and restaurant stretch along Valencia/Guerrero the whole thing becomes really shitty, really fast. Have you ever walked down Capp St at night? It's two blocks away from party central at 16th and Valencia. You really, really don't want to.
The Mission isn't Afghanistan, but it's objectively a troubled neighborhood that is among San Francisco's most violent (which is a small feat in itself, considering that SF as a whole has elevated violent crime rates compared to other major American cities). The Tenderloin tends to get a bad rap as SF's "worst" neighborhood - but its violence rate is actually not the highest in the city. Even more concerning is that the Mission's violent crime rate is largely driven by gang activity, which sets it apart from other neighborhoods of the city also.
You're still overstating the case. Yes, gang violence is prevalent, but its not like in Oakland where bystanders get shot for shit they had nothing to do with.
I think you should ask yourself what made you automatically assume I was the kind of person you're describing in your response to my original comment. Because this whole debate is constantly poisoned by idiotic assumptions on both sides.
The people that live near my office on the ground level have put up "please don't defecate near our door, this leads right into our living room" signs. Good luck getting anybody to care. Nobody cares. I bet if someone dropped a deuce in front of a New York bodega, there'd be a dozen locals competing to rinse it off. I love New Yorkers. Tough as nails and been through some shit, man, and you really get that in the culture.
Walk around late enough in the same neighborhood and appear vulnerable and see what happens, too. If you stuck to the various places that we keep squeaky-clean for tourists, that's why you didn't notice.
I've visited it as a tourist many times, and have walked around extensively in neighborhoods such as Nob Hill, Fisherman's Wharf, Union Square, Financial District, and Inner/Outer Richmond. Never stepped on human shit, much less dog shit.
The city has, over the past decades, slowly taken over all public seating in homeless-prone areas of the city. It's a sunny day outside and you want to have a seat and munch on a sandwich instead of eating at your desk? No can do, there are literally no seats, benches, or anything that might be remotely comfortable to rest on.
Ditto public restrooms, which have been taken away under the same pretenses.
Of course, the response hasn't been a decrease in homelessness - they lean, lie, and sit against buildings just fine, and they piss and shit in the streets just as well too.
San Francisco's stance towards homelessness seems to be "if we make it inconvenient to be homeless, people will stop being homeless", which strikes me as shockingly idiotic for a city famous for its liberalism.
I was volunteering for an "alleyway beautification" project in downtown, and it just turned out that there was a small, cute park adjacent to the alley. To our dismay though, we found it to be locked 24/7. When we asked the city officials, they said it got locked because the homeless were using it as their living space!
Similarly, when the cops are dealing with homeless people with mental disorders, do you know what they do? They don't actually take them to the station to write them up - they learned long ago that doing so doesn't accomplish anything (the system is not equipped to deal with mental disorders, especially in people with no money).
Instead, they sit them in the backseat of their patrol car, drive them over to one of the adjacent cities (i.e. San Pedro, Carson, etc.) and drop them off there. That way, those homeless become that other city's problem!
Can you believe it?
It's crazy. I feel really bad making this analogy, but it's like sweeping the trash under the carpet and pretending the room is clean.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6c/RIVER_ROU...
It's gotten better, but it's not exactly a residential city:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/ZugIsland...
When I visit family, the I-75 bridge over River Rouge is a windows-up, vent-closed affair. River Rouge is rather famous these days for annoying Canada with hums, too.
Most startup types here commute to SoMa, and, well...
There were plenty of homeless in NYC in the 70s and 80s. I don't think you can just explain away the problem using the weather as an excuse.
A dozen locals competing to see who can spray the offender down with a hose, followed by beating them with it, perhaps.
http://www.city-journal.org/2010/20_4_san-francisco-homeless...
"All these youngish people are on the Google Bus because they want to live in San Francisco, city of promenading and mingling, but they seem as likely to rub these things out as to participate in them."
Earlier HN discussion, studiously failing to appreciate the piece:
It is not displacement for a public works project. It is pure class displacement with a rub-it-in-their-face quality about it.
Recent discussion:
"relatively". relatively low-cost housing areas.
Also, it's not a comparable living experience at all. Mountain View is bikeable, sure, but it's not walkable.