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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

> In San Francisco the have-it-alls are now as busy purging the middle class as they are the remaining working class communities of color.

Uh huh.

I'm no fan of San Francisco and was quite happy to leave a number of years ago, but it seems to me the problem is one of housing supply, rather than some kind of vast conspiracy to rid the city of working class non-white people.

Who votes this kind of bullshit up, anyway?

Edit: there are real problems with poverty that are serious and very worthy of our attention, but this whole bizarre attempt to blame everything on people who happen to be making some money in that area just seems like so much horse shit to me.

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The same people who get angry when one suggests that throwing a brick through the back of a bus window might not be an action at ethical par with voting or circulating a petition. Try skimming the comment histories of the people who seem most invested in these stories. They're illuminating.

I'm one of those people: I submit that throwing a brick through the back of a bus window is ethically superior to voting or circulating a petition. Please skim my comment history.

I did have a look at your submission history, thanks, some nice reading there.

Quote from OA

"...one in ten mortgages was foreclosed in San Pablo. At the same time San Francisco’s rate of foreclosure was a mere 2 percent."

Those rates are huge! At the worst of the recession, we hit about one per 300 in the UK, and that was considered bad enough for urgent action to support arrears and find ways for people to restructure their debt.

I'm curious about the rest of your moral framework. How would you sort the following list, in order of increasing ethical superiority?

Voting

Circulating a petition

Doing nothing

Throwing a brick through a bus window

Sending death threats

Spraypainting "[ethnicity] GO HOME" on someone's house

Leaving a burning cross on their lawn

The BNP in the UK and golden dawn in Greece also believe in direct violent action against the minorities they disprove of so thats ok then?

Hm, what about lynching a couple of Google engineers? Ethically superior or inferior? If inferior, then why? I'm actually genuinely interested though may sound sarcastic - I'm very curious where people like you draw the line between "good" violence and "bad" violence.

This is going to be downvoted, but it needs to be said: voting and petitioning is part of the political process, but so is participating in politics as an elected or unelected official.

Being a politician gives you an entirely different set of powers, because you get to decide what people get to vote on. You can put facts on the ground. "Direct action" also puts facts on the ground and gives some balance to the political process.

I don't know what you're trying to say here because you use a term, "direct action", that means different things to different people. The people I know personally who are involved in labor politics use the term "direct action" to refer to sit-ins and picket lines. But hobbyist black bloc forums use the term as a euphemism for throwing bricks through glass.

So let's be specific: did the comment you just write try to communicate your belief that throwing a brick through the back of a bus full of people "puts facts on the ground" and "gives some balance" to the process?

I find your closed mindedness disturbing. I have tons more sympathy towards people struggling against gentrification, however they believe is appropriate, than overprivileged silicon valley employees who believe the world is anything approaching a meritocracy.

You and others can believe that those of us who feel this way are noncontributing leeches or don't belong here or what have you, but I am a Google engineer who works hard in this industry. There are things that are downright unfair in this world and the continuous displacement of peoples, many of whom have had little opportunity and faced constant oppression, ranks high among them in my book.

Yes it's sad. But what are the options? Are you saying neighborhoods should never increase in property value? People complain when wealthier residents "invade" a poor neighborhood and lower the crime rate and raise the property values but no one says anything when poorer residents move into a neighborhood and increase the crime and lower the property value. And there are a LOT of cities like that. In St. Louis alone: South St. Louis, Spanish lake, Bellfontaine, Ferguson, Dellwood, Maryland Heights, Black Jack, Hazelwood have all had this happen to them.

Is it true that no one says anything when poorer residents move in? In general, suburban America is very good at keeping poverty out, it plays out every time when public transport or affordable housing is suggested to be built somewhere.

The next thing that would need to happen is that the police department gets extra funding because the two suburban cops currently there have neither the manpower nor the expertise to deal with the increase in crime.

The locals tend to vote against either, and who can blame them? It's the system that's at fault, especially the fact that a substantial amount of taxes is raised and spent locally.

Another signpost characteristic of the kinds of people who vote these stories up: the belief that someone who says it's wrong to throw bricks through the backs of bus windows must also believe that "gentrification" and displacement are good things, or that lower-income people are "non-contributing leeches". The people throwing bricks might be leeches, but what makes them all the worse is the disservice they do to a legitimate cause.

It doesn't take a vast conspiracy to rid prospering metropolitan areas of working class non-white people; it's the business-as-usual of capitalist growth.

> it's the business-as-usual of capitalist growth.

Eh? Capitalism is about making money. Racism is the other thing. Sometimes the two mix, but they are different things.

The alternative is Detroit. Which would you rather see?

I live in Detroit and I'd rather live here than San Francisco.

No, the only alternative isn't Detroit.

Wealthy people move in, raise property values, spur local economy, but displace lower-income families and the kinds of independent marginal businesses that served them. Or, wealthy people move out, property values plummet, services are slashed, land goes vacant, crime skyrockets, and kids can't safely get to school anymore.

What is the middle ground? I'm asking seriously. Imagine you were a city planner or the mayor of SF or Detroit or BDFL of California or whatever. What's your plan?

If I were a city planner, I'd require that all new (or renovated) appartement buildings include a percentage of "affordable appartements", with fixed limits on the cost per square foot. That's how cities like Vienna keep rents affordable.

Isn't the majority of all housing in Vienna controlled by the state? It's probably easy to make rent controls work if you can bypass incentive problems by simply making all housing public.

How do you keep wealthy people from renting all the cheap apartments in the not-cheap buildings? I'm not sure I comprehend the plan.

Gentrification is often a problem of inefficient or overly segregated housing supply. Historically, many cities have benefited from highly productive industries without becoming gentrified ghettoes of the rich.

Didn't San Francisco's city management exacerbate this problem by imposing new low-density zoning restrictions at the same time as an influx of wealthy professionals starting driving prices up?

Last I checked Indians, Asians, Whites and all sorts of people from Jewish to Hindu are a part of silicon valley companies.

Next time you see a SV company, click on its about page and look at the faces before you turn this into a race issue.

It's not a race issue; it's a class issue. The non-white people that SV companies employ tend not to be the underprivileged people that are driven out of metropolitan areas due to gentrification.

Well, you painted it as at least partially a race issue in your previous comment. If it's not a race issue, you shouldn't reference race in whatever point you're trying to make, unless you're just trying to be incendiary for its own sake. And if you can't make a point without being incendiary about it, realize that whatever point you're trying to make is almost certainly objectively wrong, or perhaps your philosophy is more about maintaining a romanticized self-image than actually trying to make the world a better place or even acquiring basic wisdom about anything.

Bomb (or brick) throwing is trivially easy and makes the thrower feel like a badass without actually helping anyone. Actually trying to look at all sides of a complicated issue, figuring out what should be done about it, and trying to make a difference is hard, thankless, and humbling. It will make you feel stupid and inadequate for the task, because it's hard and it's worth doing. People who care about those things don't have your comment history; people who are feeding intellectual conceits do.

If SF was undergoing business-as-usual capitalist growth, a lot more housing would have been built, and fewer people would have been displaced.

Yeah, I'm normally pretty fucking Marxist, but having nearly spent some time temporarily homeless during my internship last summer, having to rely on a friend to lend me his couch, entirely because of rental prices and vacancy rates in Silicon Valley, it makes me think that maybe we shouldn't be talking about the Tech Master Race Oppressing the Innocent. We should be talking about the Tech Salariat and the Bay Proletariat coming together to attack our real mutual enemy: NIMBYs and real-estate rentiers. Also the boss class of capitalists, but they're a little less relevant here.

EDIT: Actually, you know what? The boss class gets my OK here, just for once. Why? Because I've heard Google has literally offered to pay the city of Mountain View to kindly allow Google themselves to sponsor construction of dense, walkable-to-work urban-style housing intended to be rented to Googlers. The real-estate politics in the Bay Area are so incredibly fucked up that Google has to offer money for the right to build a company town where they can finally have enough space to house the workers they need, and the city turns them down.

This isn't NIMBY, even. It's full-blown BANANA: Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anywhere. It's just outright silly.

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