People say techies are invading SF. They said the same about my immigrant GF | Hacker News Reader

People say techies are invading SF. They said the same about my immigrant GF

washingtonpost.com

23 pointsLibertatea18 comments

(I'll get downvoted for this, but) I would honestly summarize my ±2 week experience of the inner-SF vibe to an outsider as leftier than thou (but with crossfit, expensive consumer devices, latte and web-based radio). Some people love it, I personally find it ridiculous. On the plus side, the hotel I was staying in had International Miss Leather on at the time, which made for an interesting stay: A character in skimpy leather and its plaything on a leash asked me in the lift one day to judge the competition ("...in the grand ballroom")! (Ashmed to say I turned it down, foolishly ... one of life's few regrets)

city’s uneasy relationship with new arrivals.

It's bizarre considering that with limited exceptions (mostly descendants of the Ohlone), everyone in San Francisco is an immigrant going back several generations. San Francisco appears to be a city that thrives on immigration and new arrivals, so perhaps the people getting upset about it now are just a tiny but noisy minority?

The evictions are a real problem. I guess it's easier to complain about the new guys than the landlords though.

The correct people to complain about are the ones preventing housing supply from rising to meet demand.

The surface of the SF area is limited and almost already at its full capacity. It is a resource.

Either you let the market do, and the price will logically higher, or an authority will decide who can stay. In first case, Techies are indeed provoking the eviction of long time inhabitants, on the other hand how do you decide those who leave, those who stay? You choose the people contributing the most to the economy, or the one that relatively are bringing nothing but cost? (fireman, under-educated workforce, public services (trashs...), policemen....)

Well, let's hope techies will learn how to do all these underqualified/cost sink jobs when these people won't be able to afford any more housing.

> The surface of the SF area is limited and almost already at its full capacity.

The vast majority of SF is zoned for four-story buildings. In Paris it's six. In New York, Hong Kong, and Dubai, it's much more.

How can you say SF is anywhere close to approaching full capacity?

(And don't try to claim earthquakes have anything to do with it. Construction of tall buildings in seismically-active areas is a solved problem.)

The problem in SF isn't that we couldn't build up more - we certainly could. It's that you generally have to tear something down to build something up,. I live in one of the less fashionable parts of SF that is zoned single family, though it is somewhat dense by American standards (small lots, no space between houses, though each house does have a small backyard). Most of the houses were built in the 1920s and are in my opinion architecturally interesting, though of course opinions will vary. I suppose we could allow people to buy up a block or a bunch of houses, tear them down, and replace them with 6 story (or higher) apartment buildings.

While there is a case to be made for allowing this, I think it's probably the weakest place to make your stand against the lack of new housing construction in the bay area. We have options other than tearing down some of the oldest neighborhoods west of the mississippi.

While everyone may be saying Not In My Backyard, there are degrees of NIMBYism. Personally, I think that it's far more egregious for very low density areas like Mountain View or Menlo Park to ban new housing development, especially when these are the same cities that have green lighted office construction that will bring hundreds of thousands of new workers to the region.

Four stories? Wow, even the "historic downtown" part of my city is zoned for 5 stories, and they explicitly keep the roofs low so you can see the dome of the capitol building from anywhere in downtown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concord,_New_Hampshire#mediavi...

Paris, New York, and Hong Kong are all in very low earthquake risk areas though. I imagine people were sensitive in San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake destroyed most of the city.

That said, Tokyo shows how it can be done, but to replicate Tokyo in San Francisco would require tearing down and rebuilding a lot of existing housing stock which would temporarily make things even worse.

It's funny for me as an immigrant, now US citizen, that in a country/city built by immigrants going back a few generations people forget where they came from.

At the same time most of the people i meet like to say how they are "Italians" or "Germans" at their roots, in total contradiction to my first sentence.

SF is complaining about "techies" when they aren't complaining about immigrants and vice-versa, people need to complain about something.

Also SF has a lot of IT companies so what do people expect, miners, fishermen?

The anti-tech protests seem like thinly-veiled xenophobia. SF is too fancy to admit that int engages in xenophobia, so it chooses tech as a proxy for the attack.

I did wonder about that given the large number of Indian workers in tech in the valley.

And as the article says there is a nasty nativist "know nothing element" to American politics that has bee around for ever

That's because immigrants were largely (perceived to be) from lower economic strata, and might undercut workers who were already there. That's not the same problem as today, when the newcomers are already higher paid than you and can buy anything they want - including your apartment, apparently.

First nations are not saying anything about techies, they are begging for change (pun not intended). Unless, we speak about the europeans and south americans immigrants that came afterwards?

Well, USA should understand they are litterally pumping the moneys of other nations costly education & R&D that makes it very difficult to have this capacity of innovation.

On the minus sides, yes, you don't do brain drain by offering cheap sweets, on the plus side, it gives back point of growth.

Well, I myself is only a first generation migrant on the continent, and I don't care what people say, but I give my change to the first nations. and I hear a small voice in my head saying that calling yourself anything but just another human is the slippery slope to troubles.

The anti-techie sentiment seems to be more based on class than race. Maybe a better way to think of the problem is as gentrification.

"People say techies are invading science fiction. They said the same about my immigrant girlfriend."

Acronyms in headlines are so annoying.

So is the ambiguity of the second sentence.

First of all, I hate the word "techie". It's almost like a racial slur. The word makes me sick. I don't want to be lumped in the same group with this asshole: http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/02/01/article-0-1B1DC13A...

... or this guy: http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--WS3fM3LB...

I also find it obvious that the rage is mis-directed. The villains are (a) the NIMBYs, who are mostly owners rather than renters, who keep the supply of housing artificially low, and many of whom have nothing to do with tech, and (b) the Valley elite out in Atherton, who've created the most "placist" paper-belt economy in existence right now.

The reason I pin this on the Athertons is that, because the VC strategy of the past 15 years has been to take well-known and illegal financial strategies for public markets (e.g. pump-and-dump, collusive market manipulation, insider trading) and apply them to unregulated private equities (where they may be unethical, but aren't illegal) they've had to keep their industry concentrated in one geographic area, because the VCs can't put anything they do in writing. The result of this is an unnatural concentration of new jobs in one tiny geographic area, starving the rest of the country. It's bad for everyone but them. The Bay Area gets congested, while the rest of the country falls to pieces.

However, the likelihood that the bus vandals will direct their anger at Atherton or the NIMBYs, where it belongs, is really low. Instead, they attack middle-class tech-company employees who've done absolutely nothing wrong, and who are just as victimized by the exorbitant rents (by 40, they'll be facing age discrimination and have zero net worth thanks to SF rent) as anyone else. It makes me think that most of these anti-tech protesters are just trying to start shit with no strategy or real cause.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com