Stupid Simple Things SF Techies Could Do To Stop Being Hated
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Techies can volunteer until they are blue in the face, and it will only ever be seen as an empty, fake gesture. The real estate situation in SF is a hard reality and volunteering will not diffuse it.
"Look at these techies, they make so much money and sanctimoniously act like they are saints for deigning to volunteer once a week."
We're talking about people who demonize shuttle buses here. Shuttle buses unquestionably reduce congestion and help the environment. This is not about who the techies are, or what they do. It is about the xenophobic scapegoating of a group of socially awkward outsiders by political organizers whose previous shortsighted outrage campaigns have screwed up SF's real estate market for decades to come.
This feels more like a game the media is playing with society, rather than a true reflection of how society feels about tech workers. This isn't news.
Compare and contrast with the treatment of the financial industry in the Bay Area. Even on HN, taking shots at an obviously fraudulent financial system and the people in it will get you jumped all over ("they allocate capital efficiently!", etc, etc. et-tripe-cetera) while articles like this will elicit more balanced and self-aware commentary.
My theory is that this dynamic is more prevalent in the press and non-tech thought leaders, etc. not in the middle and lower classes.
So my theory is that, at some level, people in the press and thought-leader elite have internalized that the bankers/politicos "look right" when it comes to obnoxious wealth and behavior.
For me at least, this has nothing to do with "meeting people who are not like me". I have found the tech community to be very diverse and much more tolerant than my colleagues in the construction industry.
And SF techies aren't the villain, real estate developers are!
Seems to me the villain here is anybody who votes for more rent control and tighter restrictions on new development.
I believe when you said "votes" you meant to say "lobbies" because otherwise you're saying the real villain is democracy?
No, I really did mean it's the voters. In the case of SF (and Berkeley, and NYC), the problem is democracy. Voters are economically ignorant and tend to vote for laws which screw up the housing market, then they gripe about it having been screwed up. I'm not sure how to fix this, but more democracy certainly isn't the solution. The problem is that good government is in the economic sense a public good, so it gets undersupplied. People vote from their gut and do so to broadcast their affiliations - to show that they care - not so much to solve real problems in ways that might plausibly work.
I have occasionally thought about other systems that might work better. The fundamental problem is that we pass laws that sound like they might help solve a problem but we never actually go back to check if they did solve the problem, so over time the legal code becomes an impenetrable thicket of things people have tried that didn't work, but which inadvertently created a new constituency that doesn't want to get rid of them. I'd like to see us treat new laws the way we treat new drugs: Specify in advance what specific problem each law is trying to solve and how we'll know if the solution is helping - what metric will be measured. Then try the law out in some small region, see if it substantially helps, and only expand it further if it turns out it does. First, do no harm.
I don't read Valleywag otherwise, but recently I followed a link to an article in which Sam Biddle ironically asks readers to call SV software engineers "Software Americans".
The goal of the article was to hint that comparing their hatred of "techies" to xenophobia was absurd — the whole if you have privilege you can't be a victim of prejudice etc.
* * *
Because I wasn't giving them ad impressions (NoScript), I took the liberty to skim some of their other articles.
I noticed that they really love to pick on the social awkwardness of the techies. Many implicit or explicit references to autism and Asperger's, suggested as the explanation for what they perceive to be the cultural insensitivity of tech workers.
My advice is to realize and respect that we are using the dead labor of the globe to inflict our socially awkward outsideness upon those who would not have it. There is a real power imbalance between techie and non. We can either implement formal checks on this imbalance (e.g. shuttle buses become public transport), or we can ignorantly bumble along wielding Capital's power and push aside those we rely upon to make our neighborhoods vibrant and livable.
(Of course yes, we should nationalize the abusive rentier FIRE industries, and use the incomes to fight inequality, but that's a relatively different topic).
The idea that people can work 50-60 hours a week to the benefit of some non-corporeal entity then sit on their ass the rest of the time is also a bit ridiculous. We should be active citizens in some manner, not labor commodities looping while(1) between office and apartment.
If San Francisco didn't have such restrictive zoning, you could build more dense developments, and housing costs would come down. If you wanted to be extra nice, you could even have some set-asides for rent controlled units.
Really, what they mostly want is greater effective income.
I'm unaware of even a single case that shows shows evidence that a buildout alone has reduced housing costs. Every case I'm aware of where housing costs have fallen is at least partially due to falling demand, usually because of a recession.
Even if tech folks suddenly got bit by the community bug they're not going to be able to dialog with people who have basically NO interest in real working politics because they are simply using the public sphere to project their hang-ups and obsessions. Crazy people who want attention make up too much of the political scene out here. Basically SF is one giant open-air insane asylum. This is where you end up if no place else in the country (or world) has a niche for you and your particular weird.
Now all these fresh-faced, well-scrubbed tech workers are flooding in and displacing the nuts, who have nowhere else to go. Of course the nuts (and brother/sister/sophont I am one of the nuts) are upset.
Unless the techies can somehow develop the compassion for and tolerance of, say, Mother Teresa, for weird freaky shit they just aren't going to be able to engage with the old school Bay Area culture. And I don't think it's fair to expect them to.
Unfortunately, this means that the "gentrification" will proceed apace until SF has become the new, uh, Portland? Seattle? San Jose? Some other not-so-weird city anyhow.
This is kind've offensive from the outset, and curiously enough, the paragraph doesn't actually suggest those shuttle riders actually volunteering, or how does an employer entice its employees to volunteer for unrelated stuff in their free time.
Not to mention that it doesn't matter how many of the 300 realistically volunteer, it will always be seen as 'not enough'. 10 out of 300? Embarrassing stat to put up. 260 out of 300? What's wrong with the other 40?
Also, I can't speak for SF, but here in Melbourne I had a friend rejected for volunteer work from several charities because she wasn't skilled. Volunteer work they have in spades for monkeywork. What they needed was management and organisational talents, to organise the volunteers and events, make orders etc
startups which provide deluxe on-site benefits could extend
their daycare, meal and on-site walk-in health care to
people who have WIC or EBT cards and can show that they
live in the neighborhood. The bonus here? You can meet
actual people in your neighborhood.
2. To the extent that any of this actually is true, it seems like a failure of voters and public policies to a) allow enough housing to built (http://www.theatlanticcities.com/housing/2013/10/san-francis... or Matt Yglesias's The Rent Is Too Damn High) and b) to build better public transportation, which is related to a). To the extent that tech company buses mean anything, they mean that the current system works so poorly that people are routing around it.
As for the article, I'd say whatever to these specific ideas, but the call to action is correct I believe. Something must be done to alleviate tension.
The industry culture in the valley is extremely insulated from the real world, and it shows in everything. At bars and cafes, the conversation is the same old echo chamber; re-affirming the world changing nature of the next Snapchat copy. In a world with so many huge problems, so many smart people exerting so much effort and spending so much of other people's money on trivial things is the rule not the exception, and it's sad (of, if it doesn't make one sad, it makes one angry). You can't escape it. It's actually one of the reasons I bought a motorhome and hit the road...I've only been back to the valley once since I left four years ago. The valley is depressing to me, for all the reasons so many find it full of optimism. I'm not optimistic when some of the brightest minds are expending their efforts on imitation of trivialities.
America is looking like a class war again for the first time in a long time. And, the folks comfortably in the middle don't realize they're siding with the folks up top, either through inaction or through conscious choice to serve those interests (even if they're only middle class by SF standards and have much more in common with poor folk than with the .1% that effectively own everything). This is why there's so much anger. San Francisco has always been expensive and most regular folk there have always been renters. But, it's becoming impossibly expensive for huge swaths of people and the hope of surviving in SF as anything other than a wealthy white (or Asian) male engineer is fading fast.
This article has some good ideas. People in the valley should get out of that echo chamber regularly and do something real in their community. Come up with something else to talk about now and then. But, I don't think it will solve the underlying problem; lower and middle class people are realizing the world isn't what they thought. The odds are simply stacked against poor folks in America (and stacked against escaping being poor), and they're worst in places like San Francisco and NYC. The churn in wealth that is supposed to happen in a market economy isn't happening anymore, if it ever did. It's been locked down hard by a very few, and the rest of us are merely renters and debtors, with no real say in the system. And, the idea I see that "they should just move" is missing the point...this problem isn't a San Francisco problem. It is nationwide, and San Francisco is just the canary. It's happening in every major city in the country.
Isn't that echo chamber their community? This should be phrased as 'outside their community' or 'the wider community'.
I hear this stated as fact all the time, but is it really true? I can't speak for cafes, as I'm not a coffee drinker, but I'm in a lot of SF bars, very often, and I very rarely hear talk like this. Certainly not in my friend groups, and rarely (if ever) from adjacent conversations that I overhear.
Sure, this is anecdotal, but pretty sure all the reports I've heard of the opposite are anecdotal as well. Or maybe I tend to frequent bars that don't feature a tech-douche clientele.
Widening the net a bit, my conversations with friends and acquaintances does not include this sort of vapid tripe. The nature of the next Snapchat copy is a topic of derision, not re-affirmation. I wouldn't consider myself to be the most extroverted person in the world, but I do tend to meet and converse with a decent variety of people.
So really, who are these people all over SF who talk like this? I just don't encounter them regularly, or even non-rarely.
Maybe it's because those cities actually built tons of housing. Didn't call them "affordable", but when you do have tons of supply on the market, like those mega-complexes in San Jose by Cisco campus, it does have an effect on price.
Things change. Get over it.
Tell NYC that.
I'm all for living where you can afford.
But not everybody on Google is a high payed SW engineer. And there's not only top engineers/managers/designers living in a city.
And for $4300 I can live in a very nice place even in other high valued cities.
If you have owned your home for awhile, your property taxes are not changing that much. Your assessed value starts with the purchase price and increases, at most, 2% each year. This house[2] listed on Zillow is a great example. It sold in 1973 for $32K. For the passed 40 years they've been paying property taxes based on the $32K plus ~2% increase each year (I'm not sure how far back that 2% max increase goes). In 2013, the assessed value was still down at $72K... meaning $997 in property taxes. That same year the house was sold for $875K. Now the assessed value resets to market value and the new property taxes will be like $11k rather than the previous year's $1K. So even though the housing prices skyrocketed around them, the previous owner of the house wasn't really effected by that increase.
[1] http://www.lao.ca.gov/reports/2012/tax/property-tax-primer-1... [2] http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/3245-Anza-St-San-Francisco...
I suppose you believe that NYC and SF have rent control because housing is so expensive there.
Have you considered the possibility that you have it backwards?
But I certainly don't think that rent-control is the primary driver of high housing costs in SF/NY.
If landlords didn't want gouge by asking for fair market value for their properties, all of the old guard would still be living in SF.
Of course you could argue that the poorer people "forced" to drive their own cars could use that time, but they might not be knowledge workers, which means that time wouldn't be productive to their employers anyways.
And this also is entirely dependent on how you perceive value to be created, and the model you choose to use.
It seems like your whole perception of the situation is skewed by your preexisting disdain for these folks.
One wonders when America as a whole will realize the benefits of doing so and catch up to the rest of the Developed world.
In my experience, Americans would rather "get mine" than share.
Now, there's a lot one could say about why. I imagine it's a mix of the wealth and importance of religion uniquely in that developed country.
There's a lot the US could do with social programs, that's for sure but the individuals are certainly more charitable than certain European countries. Greetings from Copenhagen :)
The ideas presented in the blog are trite and solve nothing.
[0]https://www.cafonline.org/media-office/press-releases/2013/w...
I wonder if that's because the society they live in requires them to do so. For example, Australian's know that employed people have plenty of money from welfare to live on, so there really isn't any need to "give" money to them.
Americans know that the "have nots" are in serious trouble, so they give to them.
I don't have numbers, but after living and paying tax in Australia, Canada and the US, I'm willing to bet Americans pay less than those from other Developed countries.
Much of this outrage is actually manufactured, and by Gawker no less: http://pando.com/2013/12/26/look-whos-gawking-inside-nick-de...
* Tech companies have no expertise providing social services.
* It is a very bad idea to have public services delivered at the whim of private companies.
The answer to this is taxes. You want to criticize Google? Criticize them for using offshore tax shelters.
There also seems to be a longing for Google to swoop in and somehow fix politics, but really, unless money or technology solves the problem, Google is not the answer.
The cause likely has a lot more to do with an unnatural supply constraint imposed previously as well as very little in the way of a public transportation infrastructure that would better enable workers (both tech and other) to live where they would like, at a price they want to pay.
Providing transportation to your workers isn't a core function that you want to be working on yourself as a business; it's a problem you'd prefer to externalize or share. And the better the transportation infrastructure of a city functions, the more likely the city in general will be a desirable place for workers to settle.
-Housing prices. Supporting affordable housing isn't the solution here; there needs to be more supply. Given all the money invested in tech, surely the bigger companies could invest in some real estate. Or announce that you're ready to do so, when the city finally allows it - now the city's the villain.
-Fix Transportation so you don't need private shuttles. Either force the city to improve transportation or support startups that can do it instead.
Great coding ability is not enough to get by in life. You need creativity as well, and some understanding of social, business and political issues. Because life does not end at the edge of the CPU chip.
Wat.
The implicit threat, made explicit once again -- it amazes me how blatant some people are in HN comments on this subject!