In defense of San Francisco's techies
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They have good reason to be angry, at the city itself. It's comically mismanaged. San Francisco spends more than 2x per capita than Chicago does, and something like 3.5x what Los Angeles spends. Its outcomes across the board are poorer.
Moreover, the city is infected with NIMBYism that prevents it from employing the rational response to a housing crunch, which would be building more freaking housing. San Francisco is small, and, more importantly, locked in geographically. It's a metro area that can't afford irrational density restrictions; it's a Manhattan that zones like it's Des Moines.
People have written about the mismanagement and quality of life problems in San Francisco for a decade and a half. It shouldn't surprise anyone that people on the streets in San Francisco are happy to look for scapegoats, since it's a lot easier to beat up a pinata of a Google bus than it is to make new housing happen, or get libraries and hospitals built, or ensure that quality public transportion is universally available in all parts of the city, or mitigate crime.
For every mile Muni runs a bus in this city, it spends 9.21; comparable
agencies nationwide pay between 0 and 3. For every mile Muni runs a
light-rail vehicle, it throws down 4.37; comparable rail services spend
between 2 and 2. [1]
And the housing. Walk through the mission; while there's definitely beautiful victorians there's also a bunch of cheap shit, no more than two stories, thrown together for as little money as humanly possible in the 60s and 70s that we could tear down and replace with 10 story housing. And landlords are fucking amazing; we ended up in court with multiple lawyers because, for the low low price of $2200/mo, we expected the shower not to leak into our bed and the landlord not to steal electricity from our meter. When we lived in manhattan, people had landlord problems, but it wasn't par for the course. Here, amongst personal friends, roughly 40% have had just horrific landlord problems that ended up with police or court involvement.
And the schools. There's a reason parents are driven out; it's because you either pay for private school or move to the peninsula and get good public schools for your taxes.
[1] http://www.sfweekly.com/2010-04-14/news/the-muni-death-spira...
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/us/san-francisco-buses-are...
Why doesn't San Francisco expand onto the ocean?
Many sea-locked cities around the world do that. For example, the Hong Kong International Airport was built on the ocean in its entirety [1]. Probably wasn't cheap, but shows that its doable.
I feel like San Francisco can do the same - or something similar at least.
Again though, I know nothing about this sort of thing, and I'm just asking to learn. :)
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_International_Airpor...
2. Why not more expansion? Huge environmental costs. A lot of the Bay has already been filled so many locals don't want to continue that route. Additionally, landfill is very expensive AND produces the least safe land for a building to be on during an earthquake (meaning building costs also increase).
Much of the western half of the city is single family homes. As are neighborhoods like Glen Park, Bernal Heights, Potrero Hill, etc. The dense parts of the city like the loin and nob hill are already pretty dense. In semi-dense neighborhoods like SoMa, Hayes Valley and the Mission existing renters have to be given the boot in order for new housing to be built. That actually happens, and the anti gentrification crowd protests being edged out by yuppies, because that is what is actually happening. I'm not sure where the city could put more high density housing.
People / km^2 (all numbers obviously very approximate, so I've just rounded to thousands):
Manhattan lower-east-side 35000 pp/km^2
Manhattan average 26000 pp/km^2
Hong Kong kowloon 44000 pp/km^2
Hong Kong island 16000 pp/km^2
Hong Kong new territories 4000 pp/km^2
Hong Kong average 6000 pp/km^2
Tokyo 23-ku average* 14000 pp/km^2
SF chinatown 29000 pp/km^2
SF nob-hill 20000 pp/km^2
SF mission-district 10000 pp/km^2
SF SOMA 5000 pp/km^2
SF potrero-hill 2000 pp/km^2
SF average 7000 pp/km^2
Density figures can be tricky, no matter what the area used, because what's useful for one purpose isn't useful for another. While average density over a large area doesn't accurately reflect living condition in smaller sub-areas, it is useful for other purposes ("is the city full yet?" :). Generally it's useful to have both large-area averages and focused figures for popular subareas, maps to indicate density distribution, etc.
[As I noted in my original comment, Tokyo is notable for the unusual consistency of its population distribution, at least within the central (but still large) 23-ku area.]
[Tokyo "the city" is much larger than HK "the region", but also includes enormous sparsely populated areas... and on a practical level, the entire Tokyo-Kawasaki-Yokohama area is really just one humungous city, with a completely different shape than anything official... deciding where to draw the line is difficult, and depends a lot on what your end goal is.]
Moving from SF to Daly City is a big deal.
But we've sort of tangented off, what I meant was 'Agree with you but Manhattan is such an outlier and so evocative that the mere mention of it kind of Godwinizes any argument you're actually trying to make. That I agree with.' That's all.
Thread depth 8 or so, though, call it a draw by mutual confusion?
http://www.city-data.com/neighborhood/Mission-District-San-F... http://www.city-data.com/city/Brooklyn-New-York.html
I was just wondering where new high density housing in SF could be built.
>Much of the western half of the city is single family homes. As are neighborhoods like Glen Park, Bernal Heights, Potrero Hill, etc.
You've answered your own question.
Even if zoning permitted it, it wouldn't work to build a 20 unit apartment building in between two of these: http://sfcitizen.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/go8f670...
In order to build a denser apartment building, a developer would have to buy up whole blocks of these homes. Which means that clusters of home owners all have to agree to sell their property. Which seems unlikely to ever happen.
http://www.amazon.com/Gated-City-Kindle-Single-ebook/dp/B005...
Especially when a buynch of peolpe live on one of the faults, and a bunch of infrastructure goes over one of the faults.
From http://factsanddetails.com/japan.php?itemid=863 , talking about the Kobe earthquake of 1995 (magnitude 7.2):
"Sixty percent of those who died were over 60 years old. The reason for this is that they were mainly the one who lived in the older houses that collapsed. Few people died in new homes. Nearly all the buildings that killed people were built before the enactment of modern building codes in the 1970s and 80s. Many newer buildings were badly damaged but they didn’t collapse."
"Kobe's modern buildings 'seemed to have performed very well,' a former Stanford engineering professor told Newsweek. 'There may have been one or two that have been damaged. But I haven't heard of any that fell.' Every building constructed according to the building codes established in 1981 was unscathed."
I bet there are many, many structures currently standing in SF that would be more earthquake-safe if they were replaced with taller, higher-capacity, but better-engineered modern buildings.
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/14/san-francisco-earth...
That is a specious line of reasoning. What good is funding the city with taxes to the very inhabitants of the city who're forced to pay more for rent, or forced out because they can no longer afford to live in the city?
The way I see it, these techies, and these techy companies have a moral responsibility to use up their resources in trying to effect change on zoning laws, on improving transportation for the general public, etc.
Why does San Francisco not see things that way?
I think I answered that question upthread, but you don't sound convinced.
A friend of mine who lives in San Francisco, when asked what he likes about living there, says "it's a postcard city". I agree, but allege that San Francisco is more interested in remaining a postcard than in being a city.
I was in Austin recently and I definitely felt a much more positive energy out there than in California. At first, it was weird. "Wait, people here want people like us to move in?"
As an economic arrangement, homeownership is (IMO) a less-than-optimal one-- possibly better than renting but only because the government makes it so-- but it's good for civic virtue because when middle-class people can own houses, there's a focus on making the place better for everyone (since you're planning to be there for several years) rather than this zero-sum mentality you get in the coastal star cities.
It is kind of a disgusting, spooky thing that we just cater to the well-doing, but ignore the folks who weren't afforded the same opportunities in their lives as the rest of us. It falls on us to level the playing field as much as we comfortably can, so they too can get good education, affordable homes, affordable food. Instead we're depriving them of that, we're displacing them from the homes they've been living in -- there's something very wrong there isn't there.
Meanwhile, housing is expensive in San Francisco because San Francisco makes it difficult to build high-density housing, which it badly needs, because unlike Chicago San Francisco can't grow "out".
When Wicker Park was gentrified in Chicago, residents got angry, but then they moved to adjoining neighborhoods. It's possible that many of them kept their kids in the same schools; virtually all of them kept their kids in the same school system. Chicago in 2013 could sustain at least 3 more waves of gentrification, waves that would turn Garfield Park into yuppie restaurant districts, without displacing residents outside of the city boundaries.
San Francisco can't do that. Where Chicago has Garfield Park, then Lawndale, then Austin, then a border with a suburb, San Francisco has cold brackish water. When a working class resident of San Francisco loses their apartment, there's a good chance they're not going to be able to remain in the city at all! That makes gentrification in San Francisco far more painful than it is in other cities.
There's a solution to this problem, which is to sacrifice some of the postcard beauty of Bayview and the Tenderloin to allow high-density housing. But for reasons other people have described on this thread, the residents of San Francisco are unwilling to do that. So they suffer, and then scapegoat.
That said, some of the anger at SV is starting to remind me of general resentment of nerds, in a very high school way. My guess is both of these things are going on and they are getting conflated and that's causing real discussion to halt. Which is a shame because both are real problems, some SV people are clueless elites and blanket anger towards geeks is unreasonable. Any intelligent conversation about the culture of San Francisco should keep those things in mind and be very careful not to conflate them.
Actually, the real enemy of both categories (engineer "nerds" suffering calibration scores and cliffing vs. San Fransicans being priced out by useless, bland people) is the same for each: the executive douchebags who beat those nerds up in high school and are now VPs of BizDev in those supposedly engineer-centric startups.
The difference is material to you, because you're upset that they're making more than you without justification. But guess what? Factory workers generally think you make much more than you're worth too, and, more importantly, they're a lot more afraid of you displacing them than the VP/Bizdev who doesn't want to live in their neighborhood to begin with.
That's how people stupid enough to bloviate about "synergizing our disruptive verticals" manage to get through elite colleges. I wish I were kidding, but something like 60% of MBA students cheat.
Shit doesn't change much, and VC-istan is Corporate America, not some more enlightened successor.
Do a lot of engineers still have this persecution complex? This isn't an 80's sitcom. Grown people don't threaten other grown people for their lunch money.
That's how people stupid enough to bloviate about "synergizing our disruptive verticals" manage to get through elite colleges. I wish I were kidding, but something like 60% of MBA students cheat.
I would love to see your elaborations on how everyone who ends up using buzzwords is a malicious idiot.
For other people it is closer to rote memorization and the challenge is recognizing the problem and remembering the solution. Elite colleges don't weed these type of people out with their admission process or their evaluations. And particularly on the coursework side students looking to game the system tend to find courses and professors that are most suited to their goals. Some of these courses are even offered by "good" professors who would rather focus on genuinely engaged students and give the others good enough grades. I've even seen professors that are harsher to genuinely engaged students because they "expect more" from them.
The academic system is flawed. And if you think about it from the perspective of an admission dean there aren't any incentives to get it right. For all the complaining we do about types of technical interviews, think about admitting students to a college. You are pretty much only assessed on the superficial statistics of the classes you admit. A company can immediately reap the benefits of a talented employee that flies under the recruiting radar due to not fitting a traditional profile. Most talented high school students need at least a decade before they make meaningful impacts on the world. By then a dean of admission has moved on to a new job.
I shall not shed a tear.
They turn into New York's limousine liberals 15 years later. They gripe about "capitalism" but run nonprofits that are even more authoritarian and exploitative of the low-ranking people than most companies. Bitch, please. You just hate capitalism because you couldn't make it in that world.
The anger should be directed at low-rise zoning restrictions, and at the incredible power we provide obstructionists to endlessly delay development projects.
* Remove height restrictions near public transit
* Make the building permit process more similar to that of a typical American city. Specifically, reform CEQA and the SF Discretionary Review process.
* Get rid of free parking and "parking minimums" (not sure if SF has those, but many American cities do, and they're hugely destructive). When possible, get rid of on-street parking entirely in favor of non-car uses for the space.
* Stop widening roads (this mainly applies to more suburban areas). Start narrowing roads and widening sidewalks, adding separated bike lanes, etc.
* Bike infrastructure. This is not just good bike routes, but bike parking (which is orders of magnitude denser than car parking, and far, far, more flexible and easy to integrate into the urban environment without damaging it) near popular destinations and transit.
* Figure out why American infrastructure planning and construction is so dysfunctional (costs way, way, too high, planning often quite poor) and fix it.
* Allow transit agencies more flexibility, e.g. let them take advantage of the synergy real-estate/retail has with transit, the way east-Asian transit operators do.
There are plenty of smart and creative people that want to live in "flyover country" that have to move to the coasts for any sort of opportunity to work in cutting edge tech, and its mostly because of the biases of executives, management, venture capitalists, investment bankers, etc.
This would take pressure off the unrealistic housing and cost-of-living in places like SF and the East Coast and would help lead to more prosperity in the rest of the country. You know, the part that gets continually glossed over by the media, government, and the "tech" industry in general.
Working class people in SF aren't just upset that they're losing apartments they've lived in for years; they're upset that they can't predict where they're going to have to move to and where their kids are going to school; the whole city is crunched.
It doesn't make sense that they would, but that's okay because it's not the goal. In oversimplified microeconomic terms, new housing is built for the current price point, and can have the effect of preventing a price rise -- preventing demand from exceeding supply. Prices come down when supply overgrows demand, which doesn't happen by increasing supply, because the people doing so would lose money: demand has to decrease. tl;dr: high prices cause construction, but it's a negative feedback loop.
Concerns about housing quality seem misplaced. In a large majority of cases, new housing tends to be better than old housing, thanks to innovations in construction. High rises were popular in the '70s, which is why low-quality high rises are common: they're old.
Yeah, because entrepreneurs and technology businesses are marginalised by society just like immigrants and trans people are.
Or maybe it's a hipster thing? Marginalizing immigrants and transvestites is so 20th century. These techies are getting too big for their britches; time to marginalize them.
http://www.civilrights.org/publications/hatecrimes/escalatin...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_violence_against_LG...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unlawfully_killed_tran...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States
Ah, but that pales into comparison because someone scrawled "Fuck your startup" in SF.
Update: The root of the issue is that San Francisco has a political problem. The city's voters and politicians can't seem to enact policy to deal with the changes that the city is going through. The influx of tech companies into the city recently is the most visible part of those changes, but they're not the largest part. Rather than looking for scapegoats, San Franciscans should be talking about how to lessen the impact of growth on their way of life.
And outside of SV the same is true to an extent in the USA certainly in DC and the corridors of power people with technical backgrounds are rare.
And MP like John Robertson (Glasgow North West) who was a LCM for British Telecom before he entered Parliament is very rare. Any congresmen or senators start as a line man for the phone company?
Let's see: good pay, mostly recession-proof work, often interesting work. Crikey, it's like apartheid South Africa or the Deep South during Jim Crow being in engineering...
Compare a medical Dr with say 15 years experience to an engineer no contest.
Or work in the city and have your end customer in fiance say oh I have a pair of shoes that cost more than your entire wardrobe.
Just because your paid well compared to a shop assistant doesn't mean the technical people are not second class citizens.
In comparison, I make excellent money doing something I mostly enjoy, have no formal qualifications in anything relevant (I've got an MA in Philosophy), never struggle to find work, make enough that I can go out and have fun and so on. Yes, I'm not making £2,000 an hour. I don't particularly care. Does that make a second-class citizen? Absolutely not. (Of course, the fact that I can't legally marry another man actually does make me legally a second-class citizen...)
My problem is that any reasonable person outside the tech community would look at the situation we find ourselves in work-wise and think "well, if you enjoy building software, that's a pretty fucking sweet deal". And they're right. Bitching about getting paid a pretty good salary for doing something reasonably enjoyable, having a wide variety of options for work across a variety of sectors... that's pretty fucking whiny and entitled.
In this discussion, we started with the comparison by the author of the linked piece of animus towards gentrifying technology workers to the persecution that immigrant and trans people face. The point is this: we do actually get paid quite significantly better than most of society, to do something most of us love. The idea that we're either second class citizens or being persecuted qua being engineers/developers (etc.) is laughable and shows a complete lack of perspective relative to the worst off in society. The idea that animus towards tech workers is in some way analagous to the violence, social disapproval, contempt and often legally-sanctioned persecution that immigrants or trans people face is ridiculous.
Should tech workers be paid more? Probably. I certainly wouldn't object if I could double my day rate. Am I a second-class citizen? Absolutely not. I'm getting paid what the market pays for people with my skills and experience. Second class CITIZEN would imply some kind of discrimination or persecution by the state. (Again, like not being able to get married.) Being paid hundreds of pounds a day to write code isn't one of those things.
Take say a senior civil engineer who may design large (ie over a £billion) projects most will make less than the average GP does.
Your attitude is why we are paid so badly compared to SV
Or are you saying the SF tech companies has a noticeable difference in Indian expats employed compared to SV as whole that is interesting.
Yes, this. And it is interesting. I find that a lot of my Indian colleagues seem to prefer the suburban life of SV to the hustle-and-bustle, 'danger-ridden' streets of SF, but that's purely anecdotal and I doubt it can explain the whole situation. The difference in white/indian ratios between SF and SV is noticeable even from a distance though.
India is quiet a violent country even the sectarian violence in Northern Irland pales in comparison to the recent Muslim / Hindu violence.
This article is about a news item that is still in development. But it'd be nice to see in which direction (i.e., who are the most active anti-tech worker segment) it's developing.
I was raised in San Francisco, right there on Mc Coppin and Market...smack damn in downtown. I've always known SF to be the most accepting and tolerant place I've lived in.
How could this type of prejudice go on in a city that allows nudes in parades, diversity in sexuality, and a bunch of 12 yr olds to run around downtown on Razor scooters at 3 in the morning.
I'm just speechless to hear this about my hometown.
What I do remember in 2000 when I was there....WebTV, WebVan, Yahoo Auctions, and having Lycos go fetch a search....that's when I was 12.
I do remember everyone had prejudice against the homeless, and I vaguely remember talk of trying to oust them.
http://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Mission_Yuppie_Eradicatio...
I stopped supporting violent revolution when I realized that it was the fringe of the elite (i.e. people like me) rather than the ones really in charge who tend to get killed.
Now that the elites have caught on to technology being actually important, they've colonized us as a people. Just as they've colonized the space in major cities (see: San Francisco and New York) they have taken over us and our economy, and we are now under occupation. And there is a Damaso Effect going on when it comes to technology management.
What's the Damaso Effect? It refers to the theologically incompetent friars often sent from Spain to the colonies, such as the Philippines. The good ones stayed on the mainland; the inept, fired ones who were sent away to die ended up in the colonies and became local authorities. You see a weird and unstable dynamic in a colony relationship where the best people of some society have to answer to the worst of another. It leads to a lot of violence as those with natural leadership talents (the best of the colonized society) refuse to subordinate to people who are, although from a more powerful nation, in all other ways inferior.
That's what's happening to nerds/"techies". We're being subordinated to the worst of another kind. See, in the business/executive/finance world, the good ones who can actually sell and motivate and mentor (rather than bumbling middle managers who can't motivate shit to stink) are off writing billion-dollar private equity deals and flying around the world on private jets. It's the bad ones, mostly, who get stuck managing nerds or who end up being a mere product manager (of a product that was someone else's idea) at 32.
The reason I am writing this is because it's important point out that "we" (the technology people) and "they" (the ones being priced out) have a common enemy: the useless executives and colluding VCs who are actually both (a) running up house prices while (b) destroying the technology sector.