The Silicon Valley-ization of San Francisco
slate.com
slate.com
While I find his summary congenial to my own beliefs, here the author commits the same sin that Paul Graham (and Eric Raymond before him) committed: making a broad claim about the beliefs of a class of people that one belongs to that sounds an awful lot like a specific claim about ones own beliefs. A real engineer, as it turns out, is someone who looks an awful lot like Paul Graham. Or like Eric Raymond. Or like David Auerbach.
Shall we break it down a little? Well:
* There are plenty of socially conservative engineers. They tend not to live in San Francisco. But did you happen to notice how socially liberal San Franciscan tax accountants are?
* More software engineers go to church than to Burning Man. I have no idea how basic arithmetic could have failed to make this clear to Auerbach.
* Every software engineer I know complains about taxes. Particularly property taxes.
* I don't know a single software engineer who thinks about the millions of dead victims of communism that are metaphorically spat upon when someone claims Obamacare is "communist". This, by the way, was the point where it became clear in this post that Auerbach had decided that he was the everyengineer.
That said, I do sometimes complain about what gets done with my taxes and occasionally I wonder if the system is fair -- but those are different things. I certainly don't begrudge paying taxes to support a civil society (and if I were massively wealthy, I wouldn't begrudge paying more taxes than I do now). I think a lot of poor people pay far too much, and most rich people pay far too little. It pisses me off, for example, that I have to pay taxes on every employee I hire, regardless of whether or not my company is profitable. Likewise, it pisses me off that someone making $30k a year in San Francisco has to pay income tax at all. That's just wrong.
Finally, as a resident of a city with outrageous rents, I think that property taxes are the one tiny, completely inadequate hedge that our society has against the total economic dominance of the people who were lucky enough to get here first.
== A Complaint about taxes. Right there. =D
Seriously though, you are conflating assets and income. Low income and low assets are not the same thing. Frankly, owning assets and controlling them are also a grey area. Lots of wealthy companies and many "non-profits" are set up to maximize expednitures and minimize-or-otherwise shelter "profits" from the tax man.
What I hate is that no one in politics or even in the news wants to talk about the tax situation. Income inequality is already bad and only getting worse- readjusting taxes seems like a viable plan. I think we need to raise tax rates way up for the top earners (including most of us in the tech industry). But, it's never going to happen because our nation is ruled by the rich in politics and in the media, virtually guaranteeing no change to the current system.
I feel very strongly about this. So strong I left the US for Germany where I'm enjoying higher taxes, universal health care, and a stronger social safety net.
Is possible that you, "socialist_coder" only associate yourself, as many others do, with those that share your values? Hence?
1) I have no idea how socially liberal SF tax accountants are. 2) I raise you that I don't know any engineers that go to church but I know a lot that go to burning man. I can name 12. That's more than "Most" which is not a number in the real number system. 3) I don't know any software engineer who complains about taxes. Well one, Dukeness, but he also complains about the SEC, Weather, Obama, Bush, The Rams, and a lot of other things. 4) I have no idea what you are trying to say. Construction sentence communist. Also who is everyengineer?
Jesus loves engineers! The hedonists bus people who love burning man must die!
This is the problem of replying directly to stupidity instead of understanding the context of the stupidity and then attacking where the wind flys.
The King is DEAD! Long Live the King!
Meanwhile, 40% of Americans regularly attend church (FWIW: I am not one of them, though I am sort of idly Catholic). If developers were 1/4th as likely to regularly attend church as other Americans (a stretch, though it might not seem that way if all the developers you know are San Francisco twentysomethings, but I'll stipulate that it's possible) than, meeting a random software developer on the street, you are talking to someone who is twice as likely to attend church as burning man.
I understand cities are living things, and they grow and change and people come and go, but the complete disregard for the city's culture is what's been so difficult for me. When I moved here I was young and naive, too, but I like to think I used the opportunity to learn about different cultures, backgrounds and perspectives, not marginalize them.
I've been to the Mission, the Tenderloin, and while yeah, there's the occasionally deranged individual doing the occasionally deranged thing, the situation I saw wasn't anywhere close to what you described, so I assume it's been improved?
It was considered an "improvement" even then! And by "improvement", I mean the whole gentrification and character-of-San-Francisco arguments were bubbling around at all the hip tech parties attended by the VPs of XML Operations of every TomDickHarry.com dotcom!
From my (very limited) perspective, the Tenderloin actually hasn't changed much at all.
I used to do a fair amount of work in the Potrero hill area in 2000 or so and dreaded parking there. Then the bust happened and not only did a lot more parking appear, but many of the good restaurants in that area shuttered almost overnight.
We lived in lower Haight until 1999, and it was okay, if you could roll with a little bit of homeless person screaming in the middle of the night just outside the place we rented. Our cars were broken into a few times and we got a few parking tickets a year but that was the price one paid to live in SF. It largely wasn't worth it. First me, then my soon to be wife got a job in the south bay, we moved to los altos to skip the commute.
The funny thing is the big 'displacement' story in the city around 2000 was the gentrification of the Castro, where older more established gay folks were making it difficult for younger, poorer gay people to find places to live near the Castro (which is sort of the traditional gay nexus in SF)
IMO SF is in much better shape nowadays, and it has a lot to do with the thousands of tech companies in and out of the city employing people who add their money and the rest to the city.
The slow rise in tech in the early 90s pushed SJ and SF out of their slumber and downward trend. Now that wealth from tech is permeating the city and bringing economic benefits, non tech people want the benefits derived from tech wealth without the side-effects. Thing is, if everyone of the 6million plus people in the Bay area earned 150k/year, we'd still have the same problems. You can't fit 6 million people in a city with low housing stock and insignificant housing stock coming online. So, some of those 150k earners will do better finances and be able to leverage their earnings to buy --the less financially savvy would be unable to afford SF --and then we'd be back to 'being priced out'.
Of course parts of those neighborhoods were terrible -- it's difficult to argue that 6th and Mission isn't better now than it was 10 or 15 years ago -- but to define entire neighborhoods by those types of intersections would be wrong. 16th and Mission was -- and honestly, still is -- often overrun with drug dealers and prostitutes, but if you were to have walked two blocks in any direction back then you would have passed countless independent art galleries, rehearsal spaces, and performance studios, not to mention an even greater number of family owned restaurants, grocery stores and shops.
And the best thing about all of these places was their accessibility: nearly anyone could afford to go out to dinner or an art opening, see a band play, or just have a couple drinks down the street from their house. It's that accessibility that's missing now: working class families, artists, and musicians can't afford the neighborhoods they helped build, so slowly, through Ellis Act evictions or sheer frustration, they start to trickle out of the city, taking with them what made the area desirable in the first place.
This is ironic considering that SF got its impetus from being a gold rush town filled with people determined to strike it rich.
People flock their, latch on to the manic imprint they burn into their mind in their first few years[1], and proceed desperately fight change. The infrastructure is wildly outdated, the social network can't support the excess homeless, and the building codes prevent the sort of compact, high-density living necessary to allow exactly the sort of lower-income people and families that everyone claims they want to keep around.
[1] as evidenced by my own comment about it not being cool since the 90's, though I think I could wrangle an objective argument out of it by looking at the explosion of housing prices, gentrification, and the sort of Urban Outfitter's commercialized uniformity of the modern "counter-culture".
Even your footnote about the supposed changes since the 90's that you could "wrangle an objective argument out of" point to "since 1990s" problems that are exactly problems that people were talking about in SF in the 1990s.
disclaimer: I have only been to SF like once and I don't really know what is going on there.
The rule of thumb for buying a home is three times income, which means you can realistically only afford a $225K home. However, the US national average seems to be closer to five times income, so if we allow you that, you still can realistically only afford a $375K home. I've never tried buying a house in San Francisco, but by all accounts, you're not even close to being in the market, let alone bidding the prices up.
I also wonder how you would not notice food prices triple with that kind of income, but perhaps you grow everything you consume and thus would not feel the fluctuations the same?
With that said, one thing I notice regularly is that people seem to grossly overestimate how much other people make, so perhaps you actually are closer to the top 1% than you realize?
But I think his sentiment was more that he would bid up home prices if had the money, even as a relatively 'normal-income' individual and that most higher paid individuals spend only 5-10% of their income on necessary non-housing items.
The parent was specific about a top 15% income on the national scale. However, for interest's sake, if you want to talk about local incomes, $75K puts you in the top 3% in the rural area I come from. I should hope you'd be able to buy a house and still have some money left over being such a high earner, relatively speaking.
In my experience, incomes do not migrate well though. If you're making $75K in a rural area, you're probably not going to make $500K, or whatever top 3% is in the cities you mention, just by moving. More realistically, you might move up to $100K or so to account for some rise in cost of living, but not much more. Generally speaking, of course. There are always outliers.
Why can't you try to get something nice for the "going rate"? And how does money not enable you to make just about any place nice? Use any remaing lack of niceness to fuel your lobbying for affordable housing being built. Not that I want to pick on you, but:
Of course it's extremely easy to say, the heck with it. I'm just going to adapt myself to the structures of power and authority and do the best I can within them. Sure, you can do that. But that's not acting like a decent person. You can walk down the street and be hungry. You see a kid eating an ice cream cone and you notice there's no cop around and you can take the ice cream cone from him because you're bigger and walk away. You can do that. Probably there are people who do. We call them "pathological." On the other hand, if they do it within existing social structures we call them "normal." But it's just as pathological. It's just the pathology of the general society.
-- Noam Chomsky
Just because people are poor, i.e. defenseless, doesn't mean others should be able to have their home automatically. You might as well say "when I ride on a bus that is very full with mostly strong people, I have to pull an old lady from her seat, so I can sit somewhere nice". No, you don't have to. Apart from dying and involuntary muscle reflexes there is nothing anyone has to do.
You pick a random web dev forum, and I post there suggesting my business plan of low maintainence (for me), super cheap websites to get a start with freelancing or even disrupt it. People will say I shouldn't undercut market rates. And then I will say what the poster said, "I am a nice guy, and I try to help others on stack overflow, but if I want a nice career, I have to underbid. Sorry to everyone else."
You hold the stopwatch and see how long it takes for me to get flamed to hell and back. [the fact that pricing low doesn't really lead to a "nice career" is besides the point btw, you get the idea anyway]
You may be surprised how much of what does get posted here is full of bias (confirmation bias, selection, survival, small sample sizes, etc). We're human, it's normal. I've seen some posts about YC competitors get flagged off the front page while other YC-related firms tend to get more airtime, so-to-speak. Is it intentional or just a reflection of the community? I don't know, but I do know you can't take it personally.
Thank you for contributing and helping round out this complicated discussion.
In all fairness, if he's buying a home, someone else is selling it. I don't see anywhere he suggests that he's nefariously evicting people from their homes so that he can reside within them and laugh maniacally.
In short, he's buying empty homes, or homes that the owners are moving out of. He's not displacing anybody in doing so.
If more affluent people outright refused to pay exorbitant rents were jacked up in expectation of their arrival, what do you think would happen? Would rents drop back to the level that was perfectly profitable "yesterday", or would the owners just let them sit empty to spite everybody?
One can still live in a really big house/apartment, you know, I'm talking about high rents for small/normal ones in areas that suddenly became hip, obviously - and where new housing is needed, displacement is hardly a solution.
I don't necessarily agree that there's a "bad guy" at all, as I believe the market will eventually correct for this, but if there is a bad guy, it isn't the buyers paying above fair market wages for a place to live, it's the landowners evicting (presumably) perfectly good tenants to capitalize on those above-market rates.
Either way, if people truly can't afford to live and work in San Francisco, then they won't, and businesses that need to hire for positions will necessarily increase wages to compensate. If the disparity is as bad as "Eviction Free SF" makes it out to be, then Googlers won't have any complaints about paying $30 for a hamburger to justify the necessary increase in employee wages.
Also, the market adopts to money, not people. Only if people spend to reflect their peopledom, it indirectly does.
As near as I understand it, getting something for the 'going rate' is impossible. Homes are selling for 80% above asking on the same day they hit the market. I personally know of someone who found a home through a friend that had literally not hit the market yet, placed an offer in the hour that it did hit the market, for something crazy like 40% above asking, and was told, on the same day, that his offer had been bested.
The market may be acting irrationally, but if one wants rational things (e.g., a place to live without dying) and money is less an issue than personal security, what exactly are they to do? Sure, placing fair market offers might feel good, but if one were to do that, they would not have a place to live. If someone could do that, then there wouldn't be a problem. I can't see how pretending the problem doesn't exist is going to change anything.
Convincing nearly everybody to artificially deflate the market simply won't work, no matter how many conscientious people are involved, because it literally only takes one moneyed asshole to arbitrage the system into exactly how it is now, except now we've got one developer with all the money instead of many homeowners with parts of the money... but either way, the net result is the same, property prices are higher.
I agree that coerced exodus isn't pretty, but as I understand it, real estate in Oakland is downright cheap by comparison, and it's a very short commute away (though I've never done the bridge in traffic).
As for your other example, picking an unhip district and moving there is just more of the same problem. If everybody did that, there'd just be even more displacement from even more places. I don't know of any ungentrified areas in San Francisco, but while you might be able to find a place in a Tenderloin-esque sort of place for cheap, any attempts at making it nice also makes it appealing to others, and the cycle repeats.
The core of the problem is that supply is artificially constrained, and demand is high. This leads to the expected raise in price for the good demanded, and is the basic tenet of economy that's been taught for almost 100 years. It's not a law, but markets, rational or irrational, tend to follow its prescriptions, and in this case, the markets are acting rationally. The easy solution is to unconstrain supply, which requires petitioning the San Francisco (and possibly surrounding) legislatures to change lessen building restrictions, not hating on Google.
Rent control is possibly an option as well, which San Francisco already has, but it isn't apparently working. I don't know if this is because the Ellis act is being exploited or because rent control is generally exploitative to property owners, or some other combination of factors that I'm not aware of.
Editing to clarify a point -- I'm not asserting that rent control is exploitative. I've seen compelling arguments for and against them, but I don't have any domain-specific knowledge or information above and beyond what I've read on the internet -- just stating that as a possibility.
It seemed like the point of the article was like "Look, not all us SF techies are assholes because we don't say asshole things" and my point was more that it's the economic consequences of your lifestyle that have the biggest impact on the city's preexisting long-term residents.
I'm not trying to "you have to do that, yesterday, or you're a bad person and I'm not".. I'm mostly asking, can we consider if it would make for a nicer world to live in if everybody did that? If that was "the thing to do", instead of "fuck you got mine" being the norm?
I think where people live is kinda integral and important to their whole quality of life. Like, a human right. So I would argue that "being kicked out" is worse than not having found a super nice place and instead just an okay one.
If people with money wanted to move somewhere in droves, and couldn't, because they refuse to take part in raising rent for others, how long would it take for new stuff to get build? The poor have no lobby, and if they don't even have solidarity, they are fucked.
Oh yes, another colorful dev framework is more interesting than programmable money. Who is this pleb author and why are we giving this article any consideration whatsoever? It's such a poor attempt to dress up what is only a libertarian-hate article as a genuine analysis (see: purely anecdotal) of some urban culture shift.
I'm noticing more and more articles like this coming from the left, to which the only appropriate response is: "Okay, we disagree. Let's have a discussion. Just don't lock me up for disagreeing." Freedom. It isn't something to scoff at.
I think the general points of the article (and my primary feelings as well) is that there are a significant amount of very well paid software engineers who think income inequality is a very bad thing and the best way to tackle it is to increase taxes on the wealthy (including themselves). And that we need to come back together as a society where "we're in it together" instead of a society of private fire departments and schools.
That isn't "hating libertarians", its just a disagreement.
No one is scoffing at your Freedom, we just have different ideas as to what freedom should consist of. Personal and individual freedoms- very good. Economic freedom to plunder and horde- very bad.
And using words like "plunder" and "horde" suggest to me you are conflating free markets with capitalist imperialism, which is a very common myth. Imperialism is force, of course, and is intolerable.
New York elite are conspiring to move Silicon Valley companies and talent to New York by running these pieces right around the same time that MASSIVE New York Tax Cut incentive (no income, no property, no state taxes for 10 years) for Tech companies was announced. There's been increasing criticism of Tech and the Bay Area so much so that it would make you think SF/SV is a bad place for startups and doesn't welcome them. It started about 2 weeks before the big tax cut incentive and is probably going to increase.
And it's working, an HN member below stated, "I live in NYC, and I often wonder what Silicon Valley is really like. Most of the news I read oh HN regarding it is very negative and cynical".
1) Increasing wages in SV to attract and retain talent.
2) Medium-to-large-scale exodus of impressionable folks, reducing pressure on apartment rentals and bringing the rental market back to within screaming distance of sane prices.
In short, it's the engineers and designers making it expensive for the janitors, waitresses and security guards that serve them.
As for 2, that could be fixed easily if San Francisco eased up on housing regulations and allowed for more building in the area.
The thing that's eating SF from the inside out is the dire lack of new apartments. Build enough and the city will approach affordable for the average worker.
(Sorry for the huge delay in posting. HN has been unusually flaky at my site.)
> If the talent can't afford to live and work in the valley, they won't.
One way to make it affordable for talent to live and work in an area is to increase their wages. There is a point at which Google et. al. would stop increasing wages and just move out of the area, but I strongly suspect that we're very far from that point. Moreover, I was talking about SV businesses increasing wages in SV in order to prevent people from moving out to NYC, or cause folks from elsewhere to choose SV over NYC.
> In short, it's the engineers and designers making it expensive...
Yes and no. An influx of people with a high earning potential into an area with a fixed number of apartments for rent does raise rents. Those rents would be lowered if the city (as a whole) would permit enough housing to be built quickly enough to accommodate the influx of workers.
I totally agree that the best way to bring rental rates back into shouting distance of sanity is to embark on massive build projects. If you look at my comment history, you'll see that I strongly support this sort of thing. I'm just not foolish enough to believe that that sort of project is likely to get started anytime soon. Sure, we've been hearing rumblings from the Mayor's Office. I seriously doubt that any project of his will make a substantial dent in the housing shortage.
The article does some pretty poor posturing though, "meteor more important than... bitcoin...." etc.
"...hear that the richest 5% of the people have half the total wealth, they tend to think injustice! An experienced programmer would be more likely to think is that all? The top 5% of programmers probably write 99% of the good software."
I've never understood this quote. First thing I don't understand is the last sentence -- I can't really imagine any scenario in which 5% of programmers have written 99% of the good software. What must PG's standards of good software be in order for this to be true? If anything, software development seems like a place where there is a healthy supply of people writing "good code", often working in large teams to make great projects.
Second thing I don't understand is his analogy -- he's claiming that programming accomplishments is to software developers as money is to the rich? Huh? Is wealth a skill? So we've just assumed that because someone is rich, that it obviously means they've earned it through hard work... and not only hard work, but hard work on the order of how much time and effort was spent developing 99% of the good code in the world, which to me sounds problematic at best.
Secondly, 5% producing 99% sounds very reasonable. If you ever have the misfortune of having to work with code written by contracted companies, you would realize a LOT of code is slapped together with no care at all. The average person contributing to open source or participating on hacker news cares. The average person coding is looking for a paycheck, and doesn't give a single damn.
Also -- you'd have to make vast assumptions to claim that such a huge percentage of programmers just don't care, enough to the point where their code isn't "good". It's not at all reasonable. I wouldn't consider myself in the top 5%, surely there are those who are more driven to improve their skill. But I wouldn't at all say that my code is careless or definitely not "good". Also Hacker News commenting doesn't really require caring, it just requires free time -- not sure what you're going for there.
[1] http://philanthropy.com/article/The-Stubborn-2-Giving-Rate/1...
Are women getting hired at the more progressive companies out there? Cause these articles make it seem like it's only men out there.
To translate to NYC, the issues here are tantamount to having to account for New Jersey and Connecticut.
What's most disturbing is the monoculture. I got a haircut and the hairdresser was talking about startups. Also, in New York you're likely to see kids in the same visual frame as bankers. In Silicon Valley, families seem segregated from the working age people in the characteristically suburban way.
There are a shockingly large number of articles posting about how great Boulder, BC, NYC, Chicago, etc. are better than SV. Many of them are thinly veiled self-serving attempts to get more engineers in their area so that they won't feel so alone (ie, turn it into exactly the same environment as San Francisco where your average barrista is exceptionally familiar with the newest and greatest iPhone app and is friends with at least a half dozen founders or works part-time on his own project (s)he is attempting to launch).
It seems like certain neighborhoods are full of fairly wealthy tech guys, but that it's not all white dudes.
I know female founders, black founders, indian founders, asian founders, etc. There are around. Some are more prolific than others. The same goes for VCs, there is a large contingent of non-White people. Sadly VC is one of those areas that women are still the serious minority (though I know several of them.) It really just depends on who you surround yourself with.
I will say that there are some sexist jerks who play favorites. Someone I was dating got brought into a well known Data Science company and was relegated to doing Social Media (because you know, women, communications) on top of her current job (she has an MFE).
But I feel like there is a pretty strong informal movement to call out these kinds of assholes.
Are women getting hired at the more progressive companies out there? Cause these articles make it seem like it's only men out there.
There is a bit of a gender imbalance down he peninsula. It is more pronounced at certain tech companies than others. Up in San Francisco, you'll see far more gender diversity, but it still isn't near parity (on a larger demographic level though, San Francisco proper has a 50.9/49.1 split of genders). Certainly there are more companies up in SF that care about hiring women and many women-only or largely women-only startups do exists.
From a sexuality standpoint, you can't get much better than San Francisco. I live in the Castro so I might be biased, but the LGBT community thrives here and I know plenty of gay founders and tech workers. I've worked with transmen and transwomen in several startups (though there is still background stigma against it still being worked out).
The article is right that the average character of professional software engineers and technologists is quite good-- and far better than that of the VC-istan "cool kids". The problem? The former don't matter much, not in terms of the ability to set the terms of cultural and civic life. It's the Randtard billionaires who get to play that game; they have the free time, influence, and disposable income.
The upsetting thing is that this backlash, like all, will target all the wrong people. Do rank-and-file Googlers, commuting by bus for two hours each day, deserve to bear the brunt of it? Of course not. They're not the ones who pushed through the NIMBY codes and caused San Francisco's rent problem, and they're victims of this bullshit system just as much as anyone else.
Oh, and the reason rents are high in San Francisco is because there's too much regulation, not because there's too much money there.