Why The Tech Industry Is Ruining SF
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
I'm a starving grad student who lives a block from the mentioned, The Mill. I can't afford anything of quality traditionally associated with prosperity (car, house, family, etc.). But I can afford quality of the quotidian - headphones, breakfast, coffee, shoes, beer. And so I spend on those things instead - because there's no way I will ever be able to even afford a crappy car in this city.
And the quality is better in SF. It's true, there is always someone willing to sell you a $10x priced version of what you just bought if you want to be the sucker. But SF actually does a pretty good job at giving you what you pay for. You do pay a lot - but you get the best damned toast and coffee in the country. If you just wanted 'some toast and coffee' you should have gone across the street to Eddies - because that exists too.
The result is you get fantastic experimentation at the very cutting edge of even the quotidian. Not only does the bay area churn out Musks & Jobs', but we also churn out the Bakers & the Mas - who can make us the best bread and clothes the world has seen, at a price I can afford, blocks from my home. And such places exist because the community is willing to support them. The art of breadmaking has died in the rest of the country because of the race to the supermarkets' bottom. I think it's extraordinary that the SF population supports the common arts even at personal cost.
I think this particular (non-)problem is distinct from the expulsion of culture happening because of the commute/rent issues facing the city.
Hint: because of astronomical rents in the city, anything you buy for say $X will use lower quality inputs than a comparable thing you buy for $X somewhere else. It's a necessary economic fact. Businesses have to break even, at least, and in the face of high rents they have to skimp elsewhere.
If you want something legit, head north to Portland. The low rents there mean that real artisans can afford to put out quality product while still pricing their wares within market ranges.
If you can sell your bread for $4 a slice in SF, all of a sudden (even with the high rent), you can now afford those very real improvements to the art. There are lines out the door at The Mill - and the very reason this story was written was because they are selling their wares at market ranges. But they're selling wares produced with top quality resources, produced by top quality artisans.
The beauty of The Mill, mentioned - is the baking is done all in the open in front of the customers. If they tried to use substandard ingredients, honey not from local farms, a poorly functioning oven, or otherwise tried to reduce their quality to what is found elsewhere their customers would not return. At the end of the day, the margins are probably similar, but you have a lot more capital to work with in SF.
Also, a $100k oven and "highly-educated" bakers sounds more industrial than artisan... Manhattan has far more and far richer rich people than San Francisco, and I can't think of anyone there who would say that the best bread in the city is at some high-end place that can afford expensive equipment. And New Yorkers love to overpay for things!
After living abroad, SF is a great value for anything other than rent.
+ There's obviously tons of pedestrian/fast/chain/meh food in Japan, but even that stuff is generally a few notches above the same thing in the U.S. Even U.S. branches of Japanese chain restaurants generally seem far worse than the home branches...
[Of course, higher prices also can help pay for higher-quality ingredients, which do play a part.]
you should check out new york, and los angeles. i hear they are up-and-coming these days.
they dont even have vcs
Take the "trendy" places: Flour + Water, Farina, Cocina, etc. If you go there, you will hear Americans shouting "Sooo good! Delicious! Amazing! Soo tasty!", etc.
Reality is that if you take any random restaurant or trattoria in Rome, chances are you will eat something AMAZINGLY superior, for 1/3 or 1/4 of the cost. (then there are some tourist traps, and they don't count, of course. They're just a scam).
My 0.02.
I'm not a restaurant / food expert, but found that food is most of the time average, sometimes great, sometimes crap, around the world (in Rome, Tuscany, Paris, Germany, Nordics, Asia, US). Depends where you go, what you order and what are your reference points (culturally or taste wise).
What I think the point of the article is that, denser and well earning cities can offer more average _and_ premium choices.
(And Americans, specially in California, always say that the everything is awesome, delicious etc :)
That said, in my experience the US does other countries' cuisines better than most. By that I mean Italian food in the US is much better than Italian food in Japan.
The rent situation is, of course, out of hand, but that's mainly a supply constraint problem that's not easily solved due to our unique brand of NIMBYism.
Cheapest bread is heavily subsidized, but I struggle to find inexpensive variety bread in Moscow (and I live here). It's either very plain or very expensive or both. Even a small town near polar circle my wife is from happens to have better bread selection. I end up baking my own, which is awesome.
I agree that there are both high and low cost options. The author seems to trying to sensationalize the story. [1] But it is true that the cost of living in the Bay Area is high. It's affecting things like home ownership, income levels, homelessness, public transportation.
[1] VentureBeat's audience is probably reasonably geographically centralized here, where we understand, but I can see how someone from the Midwest would be completely surprised by $4 toast and think that those prices are the norm. (It's the same reaction I get when I explain that yes, there is a slide in the Google office, but most people take the stairs like normal human beings).
Results:
Groceries 5%less Housing 68%less Utilities 9%more Transportation 9%less Health Care 1%less
The ONLY thing significantly more expensive is housing (which has lots of causes, and isn't really related to the new tech immigrants and more to do with people who aren't willing to let bigger buildings be built). Utilities are MORE expensive in Cleveland!
http://www.salon.com/1999/10/28/internet_2/
It's basically the same thing, except from 1999. The more things change...
What do goods/services aimed at wealthier segments of the population have to do with accessibility and affordability?
I presently cannot afford a Ferrari, should I be up in arms about the lack of affordability/accessibility to the said Ferrari?
If we are talking housing, one could make a case for the need for affordability/some form of social protection. Although, I'm not entirely sold that people have a "right" to live in a prestigious neighborhood that they cannot afford, but when an entire city gets priced out, it's much easier to argue.
If a place that charges $10 for high-tech tacos moves in next door, the place that sells $1 adequate quality tacos is going to get less business from the techie crowd and as a result may not actually bring in enough revenue to stay open for the people who can't afford $10 tacos.
I've heard similar thoughts from people running mid-tier restaurants in Palo Alto.
If you choose to spend you hard-earned money in a way that I don't approve... well, it's your money.
Also, most of the these illustrations are just bad:
> Someone creates a business for consumers with too much money... like black-car, chauffeured rides.
Regardless of what you think of Uber as a company, it's a great idea, and there's not really anything luxurious about it. It costs a little more than a taxi and is definitely on par with other car services. When I'm in LA, I use it all the time. Beats having me drive around between clubs, right? What I use it to get to is much more pretentious that the car itself.
> See: Blue Bottle coffee.
Does the author know anything about coffee? The real stuff is going to be expensive.
> bourgie businesses...buzzwords like “organic” and “fair trade” and “artisanal,”
These things have specific meanings. This statement smacks of anti-intellectualism (and coming from right-wing me, that sounds a little funny.) Are you really going hate on fair trade? How can you begin rationalize that with *bourgie"?
For instance, for $4 you can get a regular cookie ($1.99) and fountain drink ($1.90) at multiple midwestern city locations of Panera. I pay more at my locally-owned coffee shops, but the cookies are bigger and hand-made.
Another example is a lunch meal I've grabbed on occasion since 2000 at a local cafe in mid-sized midwestern city. Back in the day, it was $4.25. It's now $6.75. Same food, same portion size, higher price.
The problem is two-fold. On one hand, inflation and costs are driving up costs. On the other, everyone wants to be seen as "upscale" and--in proving PT Barnum correct--will pay dearly for that appearance.
It really depends on where you go. I've found that overall, dining out is much cheaper here. I just got lunch the other day at St. Francis Fountain. With drinks, the total cost was about $20. Something similar, like going to say the White Palace or 11 City Diner downtown in Chicago would have easily cost double that.
Maybe this guy has never lived anywhere but here in SF, but dining out here seems much cheaper.
EDIT: The burger at Kronenburger was awesome too.
To answer this one must realize the true nature of these services. Their main product isn't in physical goods such as food or clothing. Rather, it's a psychological product. Customers are paying for the affirmation that their tastes are superior. For that they are more than willing to pay extra. Expensive toast is really a psychological indulgence rather than a culinary one.
The astronomical rent is a different matter, of course...
I think what everyone really notices is the exorbitant rent prices in "the city". The reason for that is rent control and subsidized housing which artificially lowers the supply of housing thus raising prices. I am techie living in a crappy part of SF in a crappy building since I don't want to pay half my salary in rent. Across from me is a Mercy housing complex with an income limit of 30k. They enjoy large rooms, views and cheaper rent than me but no blames pricing on that. Its all the techies fault for bringing income and demand to "the city".
That's a peripheral reason.
The fundamental reason is geography, which both limits the supply available real estate near the core of the City, increases the for real estate in the City, and makes it expensive to build travel conduits to reduce the travel time of commute-suitable housing outside the city.
But yet its real estate availability is much higher than SF, and its commutable feeder cities/suburbs are innumerable.
The fundamental problem is political. San Francisco is a desirable place to live - tech industry or otherwise - but everyone wants in, and once they get in, they do everything in their power to ensure no one else gets in. It is literally the most development-hostile city I've ever seen.
San Francisco is expensive because San Franciscans would rather starve, see people evicted, see an exodus of the people and culture that made the city famous, suffer incredible transportation problems, etc etc, than lose a single dainty Victorian house on their street.
Forget sustainable development. Forget development that aligns to existing neighborhood characteristics. Politically speaking, the only development plan on the table in SF is no development whatsoever.
Not all of them on the demand side (e.g., climate.)
And even if everything else was the same, rent control wouldn't explain the difference, because Manhattan has that, too.
There's rent regulation, which is closer to what SF calls rent control, but even the proportion of regulated apartments in NYC is much lower than in SF. SF's rent control is based on year of construction, and due to the construction-hostile politics of modern SF, that means a lot of units in SF are controlled.
NYC on the other hand has a lot more new construction which aren't regulated, and even the regulated apartments are steadily falling out of regulation (this was intentional - unlike SF, rent regulation is a mechanism to prevent sudden price fluctuations, not a permanent means to suppress rent).
The rent control situation in NYC is very different from the situation in SF.
I've lived in the Bay Area a long time and this sort of attitude puzzles me. There are plenty of rich areas up and down the Valley, and many places where a $6 breakfast is not something to write an article about. But yes, because it happens in SF it must be special.
http://www.raptitude.com/2010/07/your-lifestyle-has-already-...
[1] You said Bay Area, but lets at least try to compare apples to apples.
I would never live in Texas again because of the heat, as well as the values even in liberal Austin. Also, I don't like to drive everywhere.
Problem is, everyone who doesn't live here think its some kind of crazy right-wing shithole. :(