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Comment by wavesounds | Hacker News Reader

I've gotten into some 'debates' with friends on facebook who are are in the 'anarchist/burner/hipster' persuasion. And It's mostly scape-goating programmers for rents going up. But I do think the Startup community in particular could do a better job interacting with the communities we live in. Especially as more and more people jump on the startup bandwagon and don't really understand the hacker/nerd ethos of protecting the little guy that most of us embrace. The recent remarks of the founder of Anglehack come to mind as something that gives the community a very bad name http://valleywag.gawker.com/happy-holidays-startup-ceo-compl...

Edit: I do realize more programmers moving to the bay means higher rents I just think its the fault of SF for not building enough housing http://www.theatlanticcities.com/housing/2013/10/san-francis...

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I think the rent issue is definitely real, but isn't the fault of techies. It's the fault of several interacting factors:

(1) Anti-development mentality on the part of city councils, zoning boards, etc.

(2) Geographic containment of the area.

(3) Shitty public transit and overcrowded roads.

(4) Foreign investors driving up the price of RE.

... in roughly that order.

#1 is largely the fault of this same stereotypical bunch of braindead trustafarian hippies, since they tend to oppose building pretty much anything because it destroys the Earth, man. In so doing they play their role in the gentrification cycle, constraining supply to drive up rents and drive out the genuinely underprivileged.

As I said elsewhere: fuck these people.

I agree with everything you've said there. The skyrocketing rents are a product of inflated tech salaries (which will deflate eventually) and greedy landlords that can ask for whatever they want and find people to pay it for the time being.

I would much rather see these protesters target the real source of the housing crisis in the bay area rather than the much more convenient target that large tech companies represent. Although I do think Google's Eloy buses are pretty repugnant and they would be viewed more favorably if they contributed something to public transit. So why don't these protesters start showing up to city council meetings, or at property management companies, etc.? Target the landlords and the politicians. It's obviously not in the tech companies' best interests to have to pay their workers inflated wages just because the greedy landlords keep jacking up rent prices.

It's likely that they do show up to city hall meetings and zoning boards... to block construction of new properties in order to save the Earth and stick it to capitalism or whatever.

#1 is also the fault of conservative property owners, because building new housing lowers the prices of existing houses.

Yes, it's sort of a de-facto alliance: conservative property owners and clueless braindead slacktivists. Remove the slactivists and their flimsy environmental arguments from the equation and the purely greed-driven NIMBYism of the property owners will become much harder to defend/justify.

Seems like yet another example of Bootleggers and Baptists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootleggers_and_Baptists

Living on the street where this took place (albeit over 50 blocks away), this is definitely not the case in Oakland. New housing generally replaces really poorly constructed old housing that has fallen into dilapidation.

"Improving" the houses in a neighborhood almost always increases the value of other houses in the area.

Whether this creates a class disadvantage through displacement or a reduction of affordable housing is another issue, but blaming conservative property owners is not an accurate motivation. The transfer taxes[1] on housing turnover supplied a great portion of Oakland's revenue during the bubble. Given that Oakland has a weak retail (and therefore, sales tax) market, it really needs real estate to pick up.

[1] http://www.acgov.org/auditor/clerk/transfertax.htm

Hm, fair point. It's more of an issue in SF, from what I understand.

But I do think the Startup community in particular could do a better job interacting with the communities we live in

The question seems to be, if you have your own distinct infrastructure and shared spaces, are you really living in your community?

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