Why Oakland's a Tech Start-up Game Changer | Hacker News Reader

Why Oakland's a Tech Start-up Game Changer

oaklandlocal.com

75 pointsMilnerRoute54 comments

I don't live in the US, but it's weird: downtown San Francisco people tend to look down on Oakland, but every time I've been, San Francisco is unique in having human feces on the streets.

In Oakland: there's a bunch of parks, a hacker space called the sudo room, a bunch of JS related companies included npm Inc are headquartered there and the last JSFest was there.

Please do not try to understand this through such a narrow lens.

San Francisco has human feces because it is one of the only cities in the USA which has not completely criminalized homelesness, because there are a lot of services there, and because once people decide that San Francisco is home, they really, really, really do not want to leave.

First of all, there are plenty of human feces in Oakland, but again, let's try and crawl away from that lens. If you become homeless in Oakland, the best advice I can give you is to spend your last $5 on a BART ticket to San Francisco. Oakland and a lot of Alameda County's solution to these sort of problems are a humongous jail called Santa Rita which is comparable to the size of the nearby San Quentin prison. Most of the people in there are there for minor crimes related to homelessness or poverty, and their situations escalate once they enter what is a major portal to our for-profit prison system, which per-capita is the most heavily populated in the world.

I'm glad you acknowledge the problem, but I think you're understanding it through a narrow lens yourself: there are many cities worldwide with the the same levels of homeslessness as San Francisco (or higher), none are as filthy. Hell even in the US Portland has methheads everywhere: they don't shit on the street. SF has a unique problem.

Your claims about for profit prisons may be true, but they don't change the fact that San Francisco is uniquely filthy.

Agreed. San Francisco is the filthiest city I've ever worked in. That the residents appear A-OK with public activity that would at least warrant a visit by social services or the cops in other cities amuses and amazes.

> San Francisco is the filthiest city I've ever worked in.

Literally.

How many of you reading this are in San Francisco and live in an apartment building? Go and check the trash room.

You'll probably find that Recology emptied out the bins today but left garbage, even if tied up neatly in trash bags, piled up against the wall or door.

Disgusting and unsanitary. What happened to common sense? What happened to people doing their job? Seriously, is there some law which says that trashmen are not allowed to place trash bags into a wheelie bin for expensive compacting trucks to get to work?

San Francisco is one of the worst run cities I have ever seen.

BTW, Recology will not pick up trash that's not in the bin because the trash collection service is billed by volume. They'll usually ask the subscriber to upgrade to a larger bin.

[That's what happens when a private company is granted a monopoly to perform a necessary public service.](http://www.trashrecology.com/stop-the-sf-monopoly.html)

SF has the same number of homeless people, as a percentage of the population, as NYC: https://www.hudexchange.info/resources/documents/ahar-2013-p... (page 15)

SF: 7,000 / 840,000 = 0.8% NY: 64,000 / 8,400,000 = 0.8%

Yet NYC doesn't have the perception of human poop plastered all over every available surface in the same way SF does.

Walking down the street in SF near the Caltrain station, right on the street in a parking space I saw a huge pile of discarded construction of waste wood, with exposed nails and sharp edges. In any city with functioning cleaning services, this would trigger a cleanup response, since it is unsafe and a nuisance. Yet this pile of crap appeared to have been there for quite some time.

To me this is the soft version of the broken window theory. If your city can't care enough to clean up its messes, yes people will treat the whole thing like a trash heap.

Contrast.

In Shibuya every single night, 365 days a year, drunk people puke and toss waste all over an area about 4 SF city blocks. Every single morning a team of govt workers clean it to fairly acceptable levels. The homeless also congregate under the nearby train tracks, but there are so many public FREE toilets that no, I have never seen shit on the street.

SF is dirty because the people prefer low taxes to real government services. Shibuya CITY tax is hefty and rises considerably if your income is above a certain level, maybe 100k, I forget the exact numbers.

>SF is dirty because the people prefer low taxes to real government services

New Yorkers pay similar taxes as San Franciscans. Yet our service level is substantially better. I think it comes down to city governments that are willing to make trade-offs (versus those that tend to get locked down by incumbent interests and populist temptations).

NYC has plenty of incumbent interests and populist temptations.

It has one major thing over SF that makes it work: It gains much more tax revenue per square mile than SF due to its superior density, which is derived from history and its superior zoning rules.

Houston has far lower taxes than both SF and NYC and I have never seen human poop on the sidewalks. My point is that the tax rate has little to do with it; it's a question of priorities.

Walk down the tourist area of Haight Street towards the park and you'll see pieces of cardboard and what looks like dog poop or human faeces smeared all over the sidewalk. Outside every store is someone smoking marijuana. It's a terrible place to go for a walk with a baby or kids.

> SF is dirty because the people prefer low taxes to real government services.

No. Coastal California is populated by Democratic voters, people who generally prefer high taxes and more (albeit of questionable quality) government services. SF is dirty because it has never had a Rudy Giuliani to clean it up — and the aforementioned residents would never vote someone like that into office.

(I grew up in NYC, and have been living in both SF and Oakland for the last four years.)

Hear here. ex-NYC too -- SF is a lot like the New York of around 25+ years ago.

It's a bit unfortunate, but getting a substantially cleaner, safer SF would require a cultural shift away from egalitarian principles that are deeply ingrained in the city's DNA.

Note that while downtown Manhattan is approaching a dystopian Disneyland of tourist-friendly homogeneity, there are still parts of the city that are scary no-man's-land, you just don't see them if you visit or live & work in gentrified neighborhoods.

Back in the day, NYC was nice or nasty block by block, just like SF is today.

> It's a bit unfortunate, but getting a substantially cleaner, safer SF would require a cultural shift away from egalitarian principles that are deeply ingrained in the city's DNA.

No it wouldn't. It would just require spending more money on public sanitation.

Of course if you let homeless congregate and don't provide the services to clean up after them the place is going to get filthy. But there are more solutions than getting rid of the homeless.

"San Francisco has human feces because it is one of the only cities in the USA which has not completely criminalized homelesness"

Getting offtopic but: Holy crap. Talk about cultural differences. The system in my nordic wellfare state makes sure people capable of renting a house and going to the wellfare office will have at least minimum accommodation (without criminalization).

The person doesn't mean homelessness itself is criminal, but as they attest to later, homelessness related crime is. Which is true in Nordic countries too.

This exact topic just came up in a conversation I had today about some friends moving to SF from Seattle. I told them they better check out the Human Wasteland map [1] when choosing where they want to live. Depending on their desired poop contact level, they may want to choose neighborhoods selectively.

The good news, it appears most of the human filth concentrates into a relatively isolated part of the city.

The bad news, this appears to actually be something you have to care about.

(I would never call any of the big East Coast cities "nice and clean", but at least worrying about wading through human feces is not something anywhere near the top of my list)

(also for the record, I found L.A. far more filthy on average than SF, just less poop everywhere)

1 - https://jennz0r.github.io/wasteland/

> I found L.A. far more filthy on average than SF, just less poop everywhere

SF refers to a ~50 square mile area. LA refers to a nearly 5,000 square mile area. Most of LA is far cleaner than SF in every way. There are only a few areas that are comparable.

Downtown LA here, it's dirty. Extremely dirty. But a wonderful place otherwise.

There is a lot more data why Oakland is an interesting place - check http://bayarea.teleport.org - it analyses the whole Bay Area regarding rent costs, commute times but also several other quality of life factors.

According to Wikipedia, "Oakland has the fifth largest cluster of 'elite zip codes' ranked by the number of households with the highest combination of income and education". That's a good sign.

On the other hand, Oakland is also persistently near the top of the list of most dangerous cities in the US. One recent report put it at #2 [1]. That's generally not a good sign.

Is there much interaction between the high income/high education areas (presumably where you'd want to put your start up), and the high crime areas?

BTW, in addition to having one of the highest crime cities in the nation with Oakland, the Silicon Valley area also has one of the lowest. That would be Sunnyvale, which was the 10th on this recent list of safest cities in the US [2].

[1] http://247wallst.com/special-report/2014/11/11/the-most-dang...

[2] http://247wallst.com/special-report/2014/11/12/the-safest-ci...

To answer part of your question, the high-income/education zip codes are residential neighborhoods in the hills and more northern neighborhoods. This has been the case for a century. The zips on the lower end are also residential neighborhoods, but in the flats of the East and West parts of town. This area has been in stagnation since the early post-war years. Neither interact with each other almost at all, rarely even sharing schools.

Neither are areas where any business would establish itself, because most all of Oakland are old fashioned post-war neighborhoods. Downtown Oakland, and the meat of the city's desk & cubicle type of office spaces are in the center near the lake and the bridge. This is a very small area without a whole lot of commercial development starts, current or planned. A surprising amount of high density residential real estate priced for upper-middle class types are slowly appearing. These projects are eating away at the old retail/warehouse space that would typically be turned into new commercial development. There is an alternate universe where Twitter moved to Oakland/Emeryville and brought the mid-Market/Castro-East craziness with it...

[Also, there is plenty of violent crime throughout the Valley. It doesn't show up very well in crime statistics and reports because how closely intertwined it is with the poor, semi-homeless and meth. Nobody likes to talk about it, and it is very good at hiding in the bushes (literally).]

Oakland is also persistently near the top of the list of most dangerous cities in the US.

This comes up every time Oakland appears on HN. Oakland is a large city, and there are dangerous portions, and most of the violent crime happens there. The downtown area, where I've worked for 13 years, is relatively safe. I saw more crime in Berkeley in my 13 years working there.

Many people in the suburbs in the outer Bay Area are actually afraid to come to downtown Oakland. I only found out about this because many of the people that I work with told me, years after my company moved from Berkeley to Oakland. They also said that none of their fears came true and they were surprised.

Oakland has a rep. A bad one. It's a pretty safe place, but as always, the situation is complex and you can't distill it down to a sound bite.

Btw, I've walked to work (2 miles each way) through city streets for 13 years. Never had a problem, nor have I seen any problems. In my relatively few visits to SF, though, I saw a homeless person almost beaten to death near Golden Gate park. I've seen other stuff there, too. SF feels much more dangerous to me. But, maybe that's just my fear of the unknown, eh?

Being in danger in Oakland is related to being part of a dense network of dangerous people. If you're not in that network, you're not in danger. I don't know why those people make their home in Oakland, but basically if you're not a criminal or friends with criminals than you'll survive.

Is this really true though? I mean even if you are not in that crowd you could just happen to be a witness to a crime. In that case I imagine they might not be so happy about it.

Or, probably more commonly, if you have nice things you could be a victim of theft.

“Oakland has a unique opportunity. It has an opportunity that no other region has anywhere in the world, so if Oakland can’t do it, no one else can,” Selassie said.

I don't see any reason to believe that. I mean if Oakland pulls it off -- diversifying tech and becoming an important hub in that regard -- awesome. But I see no reason to believe that it has to be something in the SF Bay Area. Part of what made Silicon Valley a growth opportunity is that that area was relatively undeveloped and it was, thus, cheap. Historically, a lot of our biggest companies were founded during a recession or depression and a lot of stuff was founded someplace cheap. In order to go live someplace expensive, you need to already be making good money. By definition, brand spanking new businesses and industries are not doing that.

So I don't see any real reason to believe that any place in the SFBA is The Spot to bet on for becoming "the next Silicon Valley -- only for X thing or with X twist."

It's only a "game changer" because SF is now too crowded and expensive, so startups are moving to Oakland because it's still close by and a little cheaper.

Oakland is incredibly close to San Francisco. If you want all the benefits of being in Silicon Valley's startup network with only a fraction of the cost, then Oakland is your spot. The only downside is that many businesses already realize this and have begun driving up renting costs.

> have begun driving up renting costs

The two bedroom I rented near the 19th St BART in Oakland was $1,700 in 2009 and is now on the market for over $4,000 a month.

In Oakland? That seems about right, considering it's a 2 bedroom, a comparable spot in SF would be closer to $6 or $7k.

Out of curiosity do you know the folks living their now? I'm always curious to hear who these people that are making enough money to justify a $4k rent payment.

The Bay Area never ceases to amaze me. The rent prices are so crazy yet the pay increase is negligible.

A couple both making six figures is basically what's happening there, or someone has decided it's OK to be 'rent poor'.

16th St BART is in San Francisco (in the mission). As crazy as rents are, they're not yet $6-7k for a 2BR in the city (unless you're talking super luxury).

Sorry, I meant 19th st in Oakland.

19th St Bart is right by Pandora, which (per glassdoor) seems to have a number of jobs around $100k. Cutting the cost and time of a commute is worth paying for.

That still seems way low to me. A qualified software engineer or designer can command a six figure salary remotely, thus eliminating a commute and the need to live in an expensive city. If Pandora is doing $150k for mid level developers then I'd say it's worth it, but not a penny less.

Not all those jobs were development roles.

http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Pandora-Salaries-E262334.htm

The real estate market in oakland is crazy- wild amounts of office space have changed hands over the past few years.

That said, SF has approximately "a downtown oakland" in office space in the pipeline.

It makes me happy to see other markets besides Silicon Valley and SF (yes I do not consider SF part of the Silicon Valley) get some attention about what they're doing.

US News did a great piece about my hometown, Portland about how it's becoming a great place to start a company.

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/economic-intelligence/2014/12/...

I can attest to this. SF is a great place to start a company, but Portland is a different world. People are much more collaborative. If you start a company here, you'll be able to find help. It's incredible. I'm Bay Area born and raised, but I'll never go back. The underserved markets are less toxic, more collaborative, and foster an ecosystem in which people can focus on their product or services without a lot of underlying tension.

Great article. The diversity in tech is definitely apparent in Oakland. Not just in employee demographics, but in how companies tend to think in a different manner.

The article mentions that start-ups in Oakland are driven by a social mission, and it's very true. I work at VSCO and we're based in Oakland. VSCO is not about giving likes, being popular, or generating money through ads. We are simply about empowering the community with the art of photography. Without trying to sound too self-righteous, I like to think that the tech companies coming to Oakland also share a sentiment of contributing to social causes bigger than themselves.

> I like to think that the tech companies coming to Oakland also share a sentiment of contributing to social causes bigger than themselves.

I'm pretty skeptical. It's telling, too, that there was no mention of the big companies with their names on towers.

Your skepticism for the bigger companies is certainly just. My comments are more inclined to smaller start-ups like GoldieBlox and Qeyno.

There's lots of little startups with lofty goals wherever you look. I don't think Watsi[1] means anything in particular for the character of San Francisco.

[1]: or twitter for that matter, though I'm sure no one will agree with me

I interviewed with one of them, and they picked a fight with me about advertising because I felt my previous employer had taken the absolute lowest possible road. I continually tried to acquiesce, even noting that they had a paid option, and they basically said that they hate their paid customers, who they lose money on (why not charge us more?!?), and that they only ever did a paid option because they were forced to.

Pretty sure I had been using their fucking service longer than anyone I interviewed with there, but whatever. ;)

Fuck Pandora. They use to have a mission. Nowadays they've even given up on the vaunted Music Genome project in order to play more "hits" and shove in more advertising.

If the startup is venture backed, the mission is creating shareholder value. The rest is just lip service. You should know as much too.

That's interesting. Their Boulder office contacted me earlier this year about an interview, and I felt it would have been a pointless exercise since they'd fallen so far behind their competition (iTunes/Apple, Spotify, Grooveshark) that innovation and quality would take a back seat to revenue. Having just left a job at MapQuest (which is well on a similar advertising-driven downward spiral), I just declined and haven't heard anything further.

Glad to hear an anecdote that confirms I made the right read on that.

> VSCO is not about giving likes, being popular, or generating money through ads. We are simply about empowering the community with the art of photography.

Wow - so you're not in business to make money or get sold and get a huge paid-out for the founders. Congrats!

My personal experience is trying to run a food related startup in Oakland. It didn't go so hot, but then again I think we tried to do too much.

We tried to make the food, deliver the food, and provide the technology to order the food. (a menu that changes day to day - different menu items based on what was in season, etc) In 2010.

It may seem that you can be the 'local boy makes good' when in Oakland, rather than SF. You can garner a lot of support from various groups by bringing business to Oakland as well. Just realize that as long as you are tech focused most of your customer base will be in SF.

Maybe people in Oakland don't need food delivered because we don't have multi-hour lines out the door of every restaurant like SF has :)

I found the title very hard to parse. It would be better as: "Why Oakland Is a Tech Start-up Game Changer"

Really only two takeaways from an overly long article:

1) the diversity thing has more than a whiff of wish fulfillment to it. Repetition in this regard just makes the dubious sound downright desperate.

2) if money is really flowing to the next Netflix for Latinos, what stronger "sell" signal do you need?

45 comments? God you fucking sub-par coding python hipsters only care about things unrelated to actually doing work. Go make some commits on useful public libraries and stop circle jerking to your shitty cities.

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