> A large influx of people into your area is almost guaranteed to [lead to] possible demographic shifts that marginalize your culture.
Gentrification sure sounds like an instance of that, and I've been hearing about techies pushing out hippies and artists for about as long as I've been old enough to pay attention. The fear of cultural change in SF is a constant enough thread in SF that a knee-jerk reaction that it's racial seems like an uncharitable reading.
>we've had the opposite problem: lots of highly paid tech firms moving into SF.
Quite the problem ... the kind of problem that multitudes of cities and regions in the world are desperately trying to recreate.
>This has changed the nature of San Francisco in a way that many dislike, including me.
This is where progressives don't live up to their name. The nature of cities is constant change. Meanwhile the activists are desperately trying to keep change to a minimum so that the character of neighborhoods never changes. It's an interesting dichotomy.
>because rents have gone up so much, and also it's just not as fun, it's crowded and stressed.
Rents will drop if you increase density ... but that would mean building higher density housing and thereby accepting that the character of cities and neighborhoods change.
>I am aware that I am a part of the problem: my wife and I are white, yuppie, dink tech workers. :)
The fact that you're white and a tech worker isn't the problem. It's that you had the opportunity to move to San Fransciso for work due to the tech boom, and now you're trying to pull the ladder up so others cannot do the same.
> No one would need to leave the city - they would just need to leave the hipster hoods.
And find something affordable, until the hipsters find that neighborhood, and then shove over again to make room... I hope I'm misreading your statement, because that attitude is really distasteful. It's not the less-affluent person's fault for living in a neighborhood before it becomes cool.
Maybe the Excelsior has escaped this phenomenon, but the Mission, the Inner and Outer Sunset, the Richmond, the Castro, the Tenderloin, and even Oakland haven't. And those are just the places where I personally know people who are getting priced out. Just because the author can explain gentrification with microeconomics doesn't mean that it isn't real or that it isn't detrimental to the city and its inhabitants.
>Today, the tech industry is apparently on track to destroy one of the world’s most valuable cultural treasures, San Francisco, by pushing out the diverse people who have helped create it. At least that’s the story you’ve read in hundreds of articles lately.
>It doesn’t have to be this way. But everyone who lives in the Bay Area today needs to accept responsibility for making changes where they live so that everyone who wants to be here, can.
I don't know if drastically changing the housing landscape of SF will destroy the culture that made everyone want into the city in the first place, but asserting that it won't is just as tenuous as asserting it will.
All I ever see is rationalization that it won't, because the tech community takes it as axiomatic that they must pile into the city. By debating the conclusion we are tricked into accepting the form.
For example: "But everyone who lives in the Bay Area today needs to accept responsibility for making changes"
That's a lot of people. Including ones hostile to your goals. You would need to get a smaller and friendlier set of people on board to make a slightly-more geographically disperse tech scene work in the Bay Area. The self-fulfilling business "common sense" about SF is much more momentum than sense.
> Techies are not an ethnic group. No one goes to SOMA to try the delicious techie food.
They sure as heck try to go to SOMA to recruit technical people and try to get technical advice. How is that any less of a tribe than a specific ethnicity. One tribe has spaghetti, one has dim sum, and the other has layers upon layers of technical expertise.
> The issue is an economically diverse city becoming polarized into a theme park and bedroom community for high earners, and a bunch of poor enclaves, with a service sector that has to commute in from outside the city.
Define economically diverse. The only reason less affluent people can't live in the city is because of the NIMBYism of SF residents, and the fact that they believe real estate should be a good financial investment.
A few decades of compound interest later, you get to where we're at, where either you have to be incredibly wealthy or lived here for a long time to afford anything.
> The fact that you're white and a tech worker isn't the problem. It's that you had the opportunity to move to San Fransciso for work due to the tech boom, and now you're trying to pull the ladder up so others cannot do the same.
This is quite the ad hominem. I may have missed it, but I'm not sure where OP said anything about density or housing. Is there something wrong with not wanting the city that you love to be invaded by the human version of a swarm of locusts?
You're right! SF has an exodus underway among certain groups. It may be possible that this might be distinct from an overall exodus and resulting shrinking population, however.
Is it possible that your perspective, while completely valid in every possible way, may not be as widely shared as you could hope for?
> A friend is constantly bugging me about moving to SF. I understand it is tech central but the PR of the city is just really not great currently.
Currently? The place is unrecognizable to us Californians since the late 90s; it's been a cesspool created by a long series of events, which at it's core has to do with wealth inequality, and overt NIMBY-ism and gentrification coupled with mental health issues and ends with substance abuse and crime: and it's been like this for some time, but it's only now that the monied interests are having to deal with the very real prospect of having land/building depreciate they call foul and are using the media to leverage the undoing of WFH.
This is big tech's blight, and I want nothing more for them to finally own up to this and do something about it, instead of enabling the squalor that they have created: even as a person in tech it's hard not to give credence to the techno-feudalism arguments many of it's detractors point out as the inevitable outcome from constant wealth and power consolidation given this reality.
>>I'm not saying we shouldn't help these people, but if you are complaining about not being able to get by in the most expensive city in the country, I really don't have any sympathy for you.
I have sympathy for them, because the current tech-boom is displacing(or greatly accelerating a process that was already happening much faster than they can handle.) them and I think that's a shame. IMHO, what makes SF great is its diversity. For reasons I won't get into right now(could probably write a book on it), diversity & high-income don't overlap too much... so watching high-income people displace the diversity is sad to me. I believe it to be a worthy goal to preserve SF's diversity of culture & history like this lady carries; preventing events like this from happening. I don't know how though, but I definitely don't think it's okay to lose it.
> the fault of the NIMBYs, who [...] deserve far more hatred
When I lived in SF, the "weird, beautiful, and edgy" older culture was very much also the anti-development and NIMBY culture. I'd be surprised if that were no longer true.
> Given the proximity to San Francisco, the real estate prices have skyrocketed. Almost all my blue collar friends have had to move. It is sad that we have become a neighborhood for tourists and wealthy tech owner second homes. But, the character of the town remains, which is a nice silver lining.
You see why it’s become that, and why your blue collar friends have had to move though, right? It’s not just that it’s close to San Francisco; it’s that being close to San Francisco means lots of people want to live there, and there aren’t enough places near San Francisco for them to live.
The idea that any town should effectively push its existing residents out in pursuit of “preserving the character of the area” just seems wrong to me. Are the aesthetics more important than the people who live there?
> Also, I've always refused to move to Silicon Valley
> The author is in denial.
> it is a really expensive shithole
I'm always amazed by people who have visited a place a few times as a tourist and think "I'm qualified to shit on people who choose to live here". What makes you think you have any say in the situation?
SF has massive neighborhood diversity as far as living situations go. Yeah, the downtown and tourist areas suck. So what? That's the case in a ton of cities. I've lived in a neighborhood here for 7 years that has low crime, no shit on the streets, and is generally a great place to live.
Yeah, we've got a shit DA right now which hurts the city with increased petty crimes. We'll turn it around eventually.
>I'd argue SF isn't that diverse, especially some neighborhoods. It's mostly rich whites and asians. African Americans got chased out long ago or forced into Bayview.
> The bay area has cultural diversity beyond what most cities aside from New York can offer
Wat. I specifically think SF is the opposite of diversity. Far left ideology is the norm, with no room for dissent... and racially, it's just whites and asians. If that's your idea of diversity, no thank you. Places like Atlanta, Houston, and Tampa are much more diverse.
> I really hope that San Francisco is able to keep its roots and what make it a great city to innovate and live.
What roots are these? The Irish used to run the avenues, and now the Sunset is predominantly Chinese. Like I mentioned before, the Mission used to be german-irish, then it turned latino, and now there are a lot of techies there. Portola used to have mostly white and black residents, now there are a lot of Chinese people there.
Change happens. You have to constantly re-invent yourself.
> 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.
> The mission was originally german-irish, and then became latino. Now a lot of young technology professionals live there, cause, you know, cities evolve.
This is absolutely correct. My family has lived in the SF area since the 1930s. My grandfather saw it evolve through many stages: working class German-Irish Catholic city, military city during WWII with a huge influx of soldiers from all over the country, center of counterculture in the 1960s, influx of gay culture, dot-com boom, second tech boom...
All of those changes happened in one person's lifetime. Before then, there were other huge changes -- the gold rush, the influx of Chinese immigrants as well as the German and Irish working class that comprised much of the population in the early 20th century, the great earthquake and fire.
Every time the city changed, the people who were already there were pretty unhappy about it.
>Instead residents write open letters about how they moved here in 1976 and under no circumstances will allow their neighborhood to be different than back then.
I think this is the hardest thing to reconcile. I mean it's easy to get riled up against some rich white NIMBYs doing this kind of thing, but now replace those rich whites with x minority like Mexican-Americans who have lived in their Mexican-American majority Southern Californian neighborhood all their life in the same homes they've always been in. Imagine ripping on them for trying to preserve their neighborhood and therefore their culture. And for what? To make it possible for more people to move in and potentially make things worse for the people already there? If it's a minority-majority neighborhood, making it possible for more whites to move in is gentrification. How do you argue for that?
I'm not saying I agree with any of this by the way, just playing devil's advocate.
Are you sure?
> A large influx of people into your area is almost guaranteed to [lead to] possible demographic shifts that marginalize your culture.
Gentrification sure sounds like an instance of that, and I've been hearing about techies pushing out hippies and artists for about as long as I've been old enough to pay attention. The fear of cultural change in SF is a constant enough thread in SF that a knee-jerk reaction that it's racial seems like an uncharitable reading.
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