>>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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
>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.
> 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.
"If there's one thing I've learned in life, is to never listen to people moaning about the 'good old days'"
You're just being a reverse curmudgeon. Creativity thrives in an environment of diversity, and San Francisco became a mecca for creative software people because it was already a mecca for artists, hippies and people of all races and creeds, not because it was packed to the gills with iPhone developers in ironic t-shirts. Maybe there's nothing that can be done about it, but I think there's definitely a loss when a place becomes homogenous due to gentrification.
I've only been here since 2008, but even on that limited timeframe it's been pretty damned annoying to see useful places (like hardware stores, markets, dry cleaners, etc.) shut down so that room can be made for yuppie bars and overpriced restaurants. So we replace shops with co-working spaces and bookstores with boutique dealers of objets d'art and we pretend that it's "progress", but we make the neighborhoods less attractive to the people who made the neighborhoods attractive.
In short: if you're giving me a choice, I'll take "stabby" neighborhoods over luxury condos. At least the former gives an artist or a musician a place to squat while earning nothing and doing something truly novel; the latter gives a software engineer a place to live while working for Zynga.
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.
Those are all the people currently getting forced out by the lack of housing supply. Opposing this legislation won't magically make the rich leave, instead the city will continue to be less accessible to the middle class.
I hope that some day everyone who wants to live in San Francisco can live here. It seems like the only way for that to happen is to increase the housing supply.
> I understand the problems rent-control causes, but if it were removed and all residential areas jump up to market price then diversity would be completely destroyed.
As a matter of theory, it's hard to see that rent control actually protects diversity. And emperically, it's absolutely not doing that, in San Francisco or in other cities which have tried it.
Here are you choices:
1. Remove restrictions on building. Housing will be plentiful, diversity will be expanded, but what currently makes the city special will be lost (and maybe it'll end up even better, but it'll certainly change).
2. Maintain restrictions on building. Housing will be scarce, diversity will be lost, but the city won't change.
Rent control is entirely orthogonal to this. IF you have scarce housing, then you must allocate it among the people who want it. One way to do this is via the market. If you do not like the way the market will allocate it, then you can cap the rents and allocate it in some other fashion. But as a society, we are extremely bad at allocating things fairly (hence why we rely on markets so much; it's not that they're very good, it's that we're really crap).
Which means that the way housing under rent control will inevitably be allocated isn't going to preserve diversity. Rent control makes the lucky few who get to live in the city even luckier, but it doesn't tell you who ends up being one of those lucky few. But we know, from decades of experience, that the lucky few end tend to up being the already privileged.
Notice that San Francisco—with strong rent control laws—is actually not a diverse city. Oakland—with weak ones—is one of the most diverse cities in the US. Similar patterns can be seen across the US. Your assumption that rent control aids diversity is supported neither by theory nor evidence; the fact that rent control could enable the poor to afford to live in a city doesn't mean that it will. And it doesn't.
What really helps diversity is having a lot of housing relative to the number of people who want to live there. San Francisco has scarce housing.
> Red tape and nimbyism is hard to imagine from what I see of SFO in books, it seems like the most anti-diversity thing you can do.
It sounds like your books are giving you an inaccurate view of San Francisco, because almost nothing is more on-brand for the city than red tape and NIMBYism.
> they shouldn't complain when it turns out that real estate and transportation are limited resources that somebody has to pay for.
I whole-heartedly disagree. It's much better to try to change things and improve the world instead of throwing your hands up and accepting the status quo as immutable fact. The truth is that real estate in SF is limited largely by anti-growth laws. People have to pay exohorbinantly high prices for it only because of these laws (for the most part). I think we should try to change those laws and make the region a better place for everyone to live. I don't want to give up and let SF become a haven for the rich (plus the handful of affordable housing lottery winners).
Of course, if it turns out that we can't make the Bay Area into the welcoming, inclusive, fun, and livable place I would love to see it be then, yeah, I'll move somewhere else. Life's too short.
Also, I cometely agree with how surprising it is that cities have surged in popularity for well-paid, technically smart workers. And yet, I really like living in a city for all the reasons the grandparent comment mentioned. Maybe VR will change that value proposition though :-)
>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.
> From what I read here on HN, SF is pretty messed up.
You probably shouldn't base your impression of SF entirely on the negative articles you read on HN. SF has some serious issues, but it also has a lot going for it. Namely, the job opportunities if you're in tech are great. The weather is great. Lots of the area is beautiful. It's a liberal area (great if that fits your views), including being LGBT-friendly. It's got some great culture if you're in tech.
The biggest problem with SF seems to be housing affordability, and that's frankly not a huge problem for 6-figure earners (not the way it is for the real middle class), despite all the self-pity. 6-figure earners in the bay can afford housing, even if they can't afford what they want to own.
> So, if someone doesn't want to live somewhere messed up, don't go there to begin with.
This isn't helpful for the nearly million people who already live in SF or the millions who live in the surrounding areas.
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.
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