San Francisco's guerrilla protest at Google buses swells into revolt
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I get that they wouldn't be able to build their own little disneyworlds that way, but instead of having Google build an entire ecosystem, they could just have offices and people could just go downtown to eat, or not need laundry services because they don't lose 2 hours a day in a bus.
If offices were built closer to the city, they could be smaller but I'm fairly convinced most people would consider it an upgrade to quality of life in general.
When I did some work in Tokyo, going outside at lunch and just breathing some fresh air during the 10 minutes spent transiting really helped to refresh the mind.
I've never worked in Google-like environment, but the whole closed-off , prison-like state of the campus seems very off-putting. It's basically the business equivalent of gated communities with their own services, to the detriment of services shared with everyone. I can get why people can get mad.
Where is this prison like Google environment you're talking about?
So in this way a very remote campus IS a prison - you have no practical choice but to exist in that ecosystem.
(I don't work for Google. I know several who do.)
Sure there are other kinds of young people, lets not pigeonhole them, but they're not working at Google is my guess.
I like the illusion of an escape hatch.
To say nothing of the vastly greater transit service (though this is often overwhelmed and/or unreliable), and option to commute by other means (often bicycles).
What is this 'solution' solving exactly? These protests are targeting tech workers and tech companies because tech workers want to live in San Fran and thereby drive up the price of housing. How would that change if Google had offices in San Fran?!
The lack of an attractive neighborhood and/or housing near Google HQ is another component of this issue.
I find the protests highly misguided, generally.
What were those people thinking? They're subtly but very clearly trying to intimidate that guy. This is like saying "We don't want the likes of you around here."
If those protesters really wanted to do something against surveillance and control they should hold those accountable who are responsible for the NSA disaster and things like Guantanamo. Instead, they chose to pick on an individual who isn't any more responsible for those issues than a factory worker producing weapons is for the war crimes committed with these weapons.
If they want to start a revolution they should be heading to Washington, D.C. instead of starting a petty revolt by bullying some guy who's neither responsible for the issues at hand nor for their own failures in life.
If gentrification helps driving people out of town who display such obnoxious behaviour then we can't have enough of it.
Yes, let's remove every current resident of SF by charging outrageous rent rates and only have rich Google engineers there. Because, that's why. There's no other place they can live, of course, right?
But don't complain then when they don't have anywhere to go for laundry, or the only coffee place is an overpriced Starbucks, or groceries are double what you pay somewhere else.
So, there are no rent-controlled places in the USA? How about NYC?
Sure, let's raise your rent disproportionately and drive you to a bigger commute, how about that. What if everything near - let's say a 1h30 commute - is expensive?
Of course there are two sides to raising rents, but usually what happens is that it drives away the people that made the place in high demand in the first place.
There's no lack of space in the USA, or even in SF, but apparently people decide to go for the already dense areas.
Google could build their Google Dorm in a cheaper area and have buses come and go from there, how about it?
Not everybody is a high-payed SW engineer, so sure, their rent can be raised and people that can't afford it move away, causing more traffic (either the Google people moving there - MV is far from SF) and the people that moves out and now have to commute), more social issues, etc
Well, you can ask for their rights to be restricted, but then they'll ask for yours to be as well - maybe they don't think it's fair that you sell a great software service, with no real competitors, so you can sell it for a $100 a month, and people will buy it - even though they wish they could pay you $5, or nothing.
There's a whole literature of the toxic effects of imposing price restrictions in any of these instances. If you want to educate yourself, just pick up any basic economics textbook and follow the breadcrumbs.
In the meantime, if you're really so angry about this, why not turn your focus to the real roots of the issue? Why not work for better virtualisation technologies to help erode the tyranny of distance? Why not push for more optimal land-use policy to help ease supply restrictions in the property market? (though please try not to complain when your neighbours turn their bungalow into a high-yielding apartment block)
There are many good, valuable ways to approach the putative "issues" generated by an uneven topography of housing demand. Arguing for price restrictions is easily the worst.
What I find it funny is how people complain a lot about Net Neutrality but then on the housing issue it's "free market for all and let's bulldoze SF and build high rise buildings everywhere".
They are similar issues. There's no "perfect competition" (though it can be argued that there's no perfect competition anywhere, they're examples of restrictive competitions)
Or should we conflate those with govt-supported monopoly (local cable companies) wanting to skim money for no work, with private citizens wanting to trade their personal property WITHOUT govt interference?
The only nexus between the story and Google's buses is Google. And if any one in the world is in a better position to spin a story, it wouor constitute an improbable event.
One thing I've done to try and give back is during the holiday season, create some care packages and hand them out to the homeless. Put together basic stuff like dental floss, razors, deodorant, hard candy, socks, pop-corn, etc in a zip-lock bag. As I walked around the city and saw homeless people, I would give them a bag. It was about $400 bucks and about 4 hours of time between two people to make 20 bags. All you have to do is hand them out as you're doing your daily things around the city. You would be surprised at how eloquent, smart, and appreciative some of the people on the street actually are. If you live in San Francisco, you _know_ you're going to run into someone homeless on any given day.
That being said, I realize that I'm not the regular San Francisco transplant and most Engineers can't logically rationalize giving something away for free to someone who has done "nothing" for them.
You're not the only engineer who feels this way. Thanks for your story and a great suggestion on how to help ourselves become better people through service to others.
Solving a technical problem gives me an ephemeral and fleeting feeling of elation, which I admit is nice. The positive feelings I get from assisting someone, however, persist throughout my lifetime.
Next time I'd advise telling your story and avoid the temptation to smear an entire profession.
Maybe Google should consider relocating to a military town in Texas. It seems there is a great convergence between Google's massive (and permanently growing) data collection and the total surveillance efforts of the government.
Even in this specific case, what's wrong with a corporation providing a mass transit option to their workers so they don't have to drive in and needlessly congest the roads and pollute the environment.
The companies aren't in downtown, they're out 40 miles away instead, so not paying local taxes or helping the local economy. Instead you just have the workers who basically just sleep in SF, paying property taxes but not even opting to using the public transportation to make it better.
> San Fran is powered by a real 21st century economy, which many other cities and countries are trying to recreate, and you still find something to complain about?
Based off of complaints from the tech community, it also seems to be a city with a lot of homelessness, really shitty public transportation, and dysfunctional regulations that end up causing rent to be even higher.
If you told anybody of a city where most of the world's innovation happen, you'd at least imagine a city with a functional system of mass transportation, but we can't seem to even get that right. San Fran should be the best city in the world.
The problem isn't that workers are living in the city, it's that they're not working there. People spend a lot of money where they end up working.
The employees live in the city.
>Based off of complaints from the tech community, it also seems to be a city with a lot of homelessness
None of that is caused by having Google in the area. This is a cultural and a government regulatory problem (municipal, and state and federal to lesser extent).
>The problem isn't that workers are living in the city, it's that they're not working there.
If you're an employee you spend money where you live, not where you work. It would be nice for San Fran if all engineers worked in San Fran as well, but you can't have everything. Plus it wouldn't be so nice for Mountain View, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, etc. In fact, those municipalities have more to complain about since they can argue they are nothing more than commuter cities.
San Fran should count their blessings.
During the work day most of these people are 40 miles outside SF on self-sufficient campuses, often with free food. That means that during the week they're not in downtown SF supporting local cafes, coffee shops etc. But the same argument can be used for any commuter community, in this case it's reverse of many cities where people commute into a city.
In the case of San Francisco, this is most definitely not the case. Downtown office space (especially in fashionable areas) is in high demand, rents are high, vacancies low.
Of course, the city is small enough that once you get outside the relatively small historic downtown (the Financial District) and the new downtown (SOMA), there is older and less-featured office space. Even this is under high demand.
And of course there's the push of office space into traditionally industrial areas such as Mission Bay (UCSF, Salesforce.com). These are almost suburban in their single-use planning presently, though that might change.
Though reachable via CalTrain, BART service favors downtown SF and the near SOMA neighborhoods.
And as I've said, the bus protests themselves are really asinine.
That's not what I meant. In the last twenty years, "the downtown" has been rediscovered in most North American cities as a place that people want to work AND live in. Contrast this to the 1950-1990 period in which the thing to do was to live in suburban neighborhoods and commute to work.
The 1950-1990 period also corresponded with cheap oil (actually, that persisted through the late 1990s), abundant suburban real estate (prices started climbing earlier), freeway and highway construction (which congestion clawed back at beginning in the 1960s and progressively over the years).
The back-to-the-city movement actually had its roots in the yuppie trend of the 1980s, though it's been gathering steam with time. Downtowns in many major US cities (Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, as well as San Francisco) have have seen significant revivals over this period.
In the past, people would move to areas of high employment from areas of low employment, and new housing was built for the economic migrants - this is how cities expanded. Now, restrictions on building new accommodation entrench expensive neighbourhoods, and mean economic migrants can't move nearer to the employment. This leads to both a property bubble market and lower employment overall in the nation.
This was all proposed/explained in this article a few months ago:
"Stay Put, Young Man", http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/november_december_...
(discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6563854 )
Private public transport can out compete public transport. But then school buses already do this as well (compared to Europe). Though I did commute using SF buses, and I fully understand why one would not prefer ones kids to travel on them, and even why one would prefer company buses.
As for rents, true, but can that not mostly be blamed on restrictive building regulations? Not so much with regards to standards as well with regards to limits to flats and highrise buildings. As there is an undisputed market demand for more housing in the bay-area.
Imho protesters are a tad misguided in who they are targeting.
protesters are misguided.
There is a legion of people making six figures, who together have a lot of power if they were to try to do something. I know disruption or even violence won't help at first, but it raises awareness. Maybe then people can start talking about intelligent measures to help those who need it.
I know if I was making 200k I'd be glad to be taxed an extra %, if that money was going towards help for people who've seen the place they lived their whole life slowly push them out, even though they're still needed there.
That's an important point. The big fishes need the small ones to survive, so there's demand, demand for people to do lesser paid activities and being in a constant struggle.
Then again I'm Swiss, and we have a history of voting ourselves tax raises, most of which goes to to the lower classes in some way. We live in a pretty happy and safe society though, infrastructures are great and affordable (mostly free if you don't make much). Seems to me like a good tradeoff for passing on a new TV or some designer clothes once a year.
Even a direct redistribution scheme wouldn't do much, because the rich will still be able to outbid the poor for the scarce apartments. Short of rich people deciding they don't want to take that job in the Bay Area or government straight up banning them from moving there, I don't think there's much anyone can do to help prevent the poor from being displaced.
Getting SF to allow new construction would help a lot (there are probably thousands of developers that would love to build 100+ unit luxury complexes in the Mission), but at this point it seems that's something of a losing battle. Weirdly, it's the very people that are protesting the current influx of tech workers and rising rents that most viciously oppose new high-occupancy construction in the "true" SF neighborhoods because it would destroy their character, so it's a tough nut to crack.
That's really unfortunate, I'd hope that people would realize that you can have good-quality high-occupancy construction(see loads of places in Europe, Japan).
I don't necessarily know if it's a zero-sum game though. If higher quality mass transit were in place, the cost of living out of the city would be lessened (both in cost and stress).
I think it would be really cool if San Francisco built a subway line that went down south. It would convince people to not live exactly in the city center (because you'd have relatively easy access by subway), so could ease real estate preasures downtown, and would generally encourage a better spread of the population. It's not that people want to live downtown, but that they want to easily get downtown.
Examples of that are "sponsored" apartments, that cities rent to their owners for regular price, and subside to people but with an adaptive price (much lower for lower income people, and a little higher for people who make more than average)
In more urgent cases, social services cooperate with people who own unused buildings, hotels during low season, etc, and pay a big price to keep people under a roof.
There's also a lot of work from associations to communicate with landlords and agencies, trying to help giving a fair chance and renting affordable places to people with regular income, students, etc, as many wealthy people are interested in cheap places too.
I feel like the people who control most of the market have a lot of political power, and they don't want a bunch of buildings popping out and lowering market pressure, making prices and their revenue drop. Money is not a definitive solution, but in the right hands it can help a lot. In turn it creates a nicer social climate, and things work out better for everyone.
A nicer social climate isn't in everyone's interest though, and a lot of people work very hard to make sure there is tension, because they profit from it, a lot.
But they're clearly not still needed there - otherwise demand for their services would be high enough that they would be able to fetch a market price high enough to allow them to compete in the housing markets.
The big fishes need the small ones to survive
Let me ask a tough question: why do these big fishes need the small ones? What exactly makes the small ones so essential? To make coffee? To staff checkouts? If demand for these arguably location-limited services is so high, then a shortage of suitably qualified labourers will result in a price increase until demand and supply equilibrate. But I haven't heard of any protests by high-wage SF residents at their inability to procure the services they desire, so things seem to be ticking over. No ham-fisted government intervention necessary.
Your only problem here is if you think that successful people have some sort of obligation or self-interest to continually devolve income to support the less successful. But that's a new conversation.
Google's buses are solving more traffic problems in MountainView than San Francisco and relieving the congestion that most impacts commuters from San Francisco to their campus. If the service had to meet the requirements for public transportation i.e. meeting public needs, Google would shut it down.
As for solving traffic problems, they don't necessarily do this more so than public transport would, if Googlers took that.
I think the issue is more that MUNI might have to think about introducing first-class busses, or first-class sections, or something like that. Because many people don't like sharing a bus bench with smelly (homeless) people.
http://www.caltrain.com/schedules/Shuttles/Shoreline_Shuttle... (See the fine print at the bottom for details.)
It's potentially possible that a similar approach could be done for the SF to Mountain View commute, where Google subsidizes the creation of specific public bus lines in exchange for Google employees riding for free, or something like that. That would probably make the community happier about the bus issue, although it wouldn't fix the rent/displacement issue at all.
...and be subsidized by tax-payers (because public transit systems in big cities don't break-even on fares - and forget about capital projects, those always need government funds). So this is still a net-win for the city. Googlers subsidize a system they don't use to get to work.
In essence the citizens of San Francisco are subsidizing the tax payers of Mountain View because of their unwillingness to create affordable housing and provide public transit that serves the needs of its workforce. Google's buses are the means by which that subsidy occurs.
There is nothing preventing Google from routes that pickup and deliver exclusively upon private property. Nor is there anything preventing Google from opening access to its bus service to the public.
There is not even anything to prevent them from operating their bus service at a profit...except the impossibility of doing so.
>A company in Mountain View is using San Francisco's public infrastructure for private purposes and not paying for the costs associated with that infrastructure.
You mean roads? Public roads, built to serve San Francisco citizens? Those roads?
And that theft that the despicable Mountain View company is committing involves providing a service for San Fran employees who would otherwise drive into work and congest the roads and pollute the air, or worse, not live in San Fran? It seems like the implication is that it's better that these engineering yuppies not live in San Fran. That's the subtext here.
>In essence the citizens of San Francisco are subsidizing the tax payers of Mountain View because of their unwillingness to create affordable housing and provide public transit that serves the needs of its workforce.
I really don't understand your mental gymnastics. How, under any reasonable interpretation, is it a negative for an upper-middle class young engineer-types, to choose to live in San Fran - pay San Fran property taxes, support local business by living and spending money in the area, as opposed to not. Your interpretation is insanity. Furthermore, you've got it all backwards as I've said. Those commuting San Fran engineers are paying municipal taxes. They are contributing to that city. They aren't contributing to Mountain View. They are a drag on that city. Every San Fran engineer is a drag on Mountain View, if anything. But that's why cities exist. To provide services like that because you're all part of the same fuckin country and the same fuckin state and the same fuckin region, and you're treating it like some sort of fuckin theft is happening from those foreigners 40 minutes away. Insanity.
San Franciscans really doesn't know how good they've got it.
//
I know there's an ideological reason why you're focusing on big evil Google. But it's actually San Francisco citizens that want to live in San Fran, and work at Google. Google doesn't care where they live. They would probably prefer their employees to live in Mountain View. It's San Francisco citizens that are choosing this.
edit: Rent prices are crazy though.
My biggest concern - though it might just be because I was downtown, or that I've not spent much time in US cities - was the large number of homeless. Maybe the Googles and SalesForces in the area could help those guys out?
The study is here: http://www.danielledai.com/academic/dai-weinzimmer-shuttles....
If those guys were going to a factory job, they'd be ok neighbors. But because they're going to a better job, it's cool to make trouble for them.
Bet they've been using Google Drive to organise.
Still, this is a really interesting clash of interests - between the infrastructural needs of potentially the great city of the 21st century, and its cultural roots. You need a mix of both - you can't just turn SF into a grid of mega-skyscrapers, although that'd open the gates for great companies, and real progress - you need something of the old sense of city and style - but you can't just pretend the city can still function and thrive as a museum of genteel Victorians and arts and craft co-ops, while the future brews down in San Jose... You need capacity and character to build the launchpad of the future.