East Bay (by which I assume the Tri-Valley and LaMoraga+Walnut Creek) always had a massive tech presence - going from Livermore+Sandia+Berkeley Labs to PacBell to PeopleSoft to HPC@Cheveron+PGE to Workday+Veeva today and the Telcos in LaMoraga+Walnut Creek. Most Asian and White techies with families try to buy houses out there hence why you see Palo Alto level housing prices.
If by East Bay you mean Oakland and its denizens, I don't see it happening. Oakland+Berkeley local govt makes SF appear very startup friendly.
it makes me super sad to see SF like this. it's by far my favorite US city -- the weather is great, people are quite welcoming, the food scene is out of this world.
but the last time i went there, just before the pandemic, it was just... horrible. within 1h of leaving my hotel, i saw a guy breaking into a car. a block later, two homeless people were arguing and then started beating each other to a pulp.
Reminds me when I first moved to SF. I saw a guy breaking car windows on the street at night and called 911 to notify the police. They seemed a bit baffled that someone would call to report something so trivial and I don't believe they did anything about it.
Why don't they do anything to fix it? I truly don't understand the logic here. It's the same as Seattle. They've gone so far left that they've started delving into the absurd.
> i saw a guy breaking into a car. a block later, two homeless people were arguing and then started beating each other
Implied is that you didn't do anything about either of these things you witnessed. I don't mean to single you out, but collectively for the people of the city: wouldn't it be better if you stopped expecting somebody else to fix the problems? Instead, be part of a better community by trying to right what wrongs you can. At the very least, photograph the thief and send it to the police, if not trying to stop him yourself. Similar for the fighting homeless people.
Yeah, maybe that's dangerous. I don't want to start the conversation of Californians trying so hard to give up their right to self defense. But maybe that's the reason we don't see such a big problem in, e.g., Texas.
I don't think you get it. The community is no more. Its all transient SV, just like NYC.
Most pay taxes, sometimes very high taxes. And, San Franciscans have voted to have someone else fix the issue.
The citizens gave the monopoly of violence to the government, so citizens would be safe. The government has stopped protecting its citizens and their property. The social contract is broken.
I think you misunderstand me - I think you and I are in agreement.
But although the SFans made a deal with the devil, there's no reason they can't go back and change that. It's not written in blood, they still can go take back their community themselves.
There is no community to turn this around anymore. What could have been the community is gone. Those people are not voting anymore.
They leave. Gone. Poof.
For something to turn around, you have to make an investment (money/time). People with money and means are going to invest elsewhere especially since they don't really have a true community to defend. They started as transients, remember that. No generations of family. No roots.
Attempting to fix these issues yourself every time they occur (which would be often in SF) is a recipe for ending up in TFA. Last time I tried to offer something to a homeless man, he pulled out a knife and started chasing me (he must've not been anywhere near reality). It needs a collective response from everyone, like government, not a lone vigilante.
A "lone vigilante" is indeed a useful idea for SF.
The local SF TV streamers and memers should re-broadcast Charles Bronson's "Death Wish" movies. Perhaps doing so will inspire civic responsibility in SFans! IIRC there's even a bit of drone technology in one of the later movies.8-))
The police will not pick up the phone for homeless people fighting or a car break in. If you are advocating physically intervening then that is terrible terrible advice. Keep your head down and don't walk around in certain areas or at certain times.
What can you do? Lots of people have tried and do try.
As per other comments, the police won't act on it and if they do the DA won't and even when all this happens they get let go of easily and come back for more. Lots of these people are repeat offenders.
Tech in SF causing massive inequality in the city combined with structural American problems is how SF got where it is today though. Moving tech somewhere else (Austin seems to be next) will just result in a similar situation.
An injection of rich taxpayers is exactly what most cities with a poor and needy population would be crying out for, in order to fund social services.
It is specifically the decision to keep housing close to zero-sum that makes this such a catastrophe. SF isn’t the only place that would make that decision, but is also possible to welcome & accommodate growth rather than trying to strangle it at the expense of all your renters.
In other countries you have cities begging for any kind of tech investment. The idea of tech being anything other than boon is essentially outside the political spectrum
Dude did you spend any time in San Francisco in the 80s? The 90s? San Francisco is how San Francisco got where it is today, the same place it was 40 years ago.
Lol. Tech or backlash against tech didn't create SF culture. SF culture comes from the 60s, Berkeley, Hippies and left wing policies, protest movement politics.
Austin has rich cultural background that is different. Moving to Austin won't change it into SF unless enough people bring failed ideas with them.
> Hippie Hollow Park (originally known as McGregor County Park) is a park located on the shore of Lake Travis in northwest Austin. It is the only legally recognized clothing-optional public park in the State of Texas.
I would bet that Austin's culture is not the same to SF's culture but there is probably some overlap that makes it appealing to the people moving there.
Parent was wondering if the same will happen. Of course Austin is lefty culture. Anyone suggesting Austin wants that.. but it is not SF... you can open carry your gun in the nudest park..
I'm not 100% following what you're trying to say here. I will note that until 1995 in Texas, no civilian could carry a gun full stop; there isn't actually as much of a rich history there as people might imagine. That said, I doubt many people in Austin voted for the legislators who made that happen at the state level.
Housing inequality could be fixed with a land tax. A land tax makes nimbyism significantly more expensive, so they're more willing to sell property to high density housing developers.
Places like Texas, with a property tax and little zoning, would handle a concentration of wealth better. Although, it'd be even more optional with a land tax instead of a property tax.
This idea is DOA because it always results in human interest stories on the local news with an 80-year-old grandma who lived in the house for 40 years suddenly not being able to afford her taxes. And then you get Prop. 13 to prevent that.
It is unclear how a land tax would specifically affect NIMBYs and not everyone. It seems more akin to a plan for almost total divestment of private land ownership.
You're talking about raw communism, whether or not you know it. It is immaterial whether or not land is forcibly taken or the (I assume federal) "land tax" is raised to the degree that no one can afford land except government subsidized high density housing developers. With this being the intent of raising the tax to whatever level it falls.
You may as well just confiscate the land and dispense with the pretense.
Before you begin confiscating land, try proving that inequality issues can be solved with parallel yet less potentially damaging measures. As a test run. For example, begin with educational outcomes. What have been the quantitative results of massive funding toward eliminating educational inequality? Metros like DC have some of the highest per student public school funds in the Nation.
The housing parallel is the failed social history of high density urban "projects". Which no one likes to live in nor to be around. And which have been a disaster for urban areas, with few exceptions.
It's amusing to consider that among some adherents to Henry George's theories (which largely undergird the concept of the land tax), there is a narrative that Marxist communism was a plot by neo-aristocratic parasitic monopolists to diminish the capitalist classical economics of Smith and Ricardo by sidelining Georgism (which they view as compatible with classical economics) while pushing neo-classical theories. See the work of Mason Gaffney:
How is this unfair to communism? The elimination of private land ownership and housing choice are core methods of Leninism. The only others being forced culture cleansing and imperialism.
Explain how government forced divestment from single family private land ownership is capitalism. Other than communism, you seem to be thinking of a potential action inherent within fascism.
It's also because, by coincidence, U.S. State Department official Wolf Ladejinsky was influenced by Georgism. He was certainly no fan of communism, as he was a Ukrainian refugee from Bolshevik rule!
Incidentally, while Taiwan does not have exclusive government ownership of land unlike Singapore, Hong Kong, or mainland China, it is a very successful example of land reform (which involved confiscation):
It's not. For one thing, rental prices have been going up in a steady trend for over half a century. The tech industry didn't cause the rise in prices per se, the general economic growth of the region did (and does) that:
> Today's outrageous prices are exactly in line with the 6.6% trend that began 60 years ago.
For another, look at the history of the city, we have been a nut house for ~150 years, since the gold was discovered. We had an Emperor! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Norton
If an increase of wealth creation is a problem for a city, that city is being badly run.
It's pretty obvious on the ground in SF that the homeless problem is fundamentally a problem of mental illness and drug abuse. A fairly large portion of the homeless there are not from SF but came there because SF tolerates behavior other cities do not. Even if there was an empty, free house offered to every homeless person in SF there would still be a massive problem because many of them would be unwilling to accept it.
A lot of high income people concentrated in one area leads to things like income inequality compared to everyone else. It also causes housing prices to rise which leads to homelessness which causes or worsens property crime, drug use, mental illness, and general desperation that can incite violent crime.
It only leads to housing prices rising (in the long-term), if NIMBY politics makes building new housing essentially illegal. There are plenty of examples of "boom towns" throughout history where prices may have rose initially, but didn't spiral out of control, and usually settled back to a reasonable baseline relative to wages.
We aren’t at the root cause yet. NIMBY politics are largely caused by the idea that housing is an investment rather a basic human need and depreciating asset which is a rather new idea in relation to “throughout history”. People generally don’t want to vote for things that harm their investments and building new housing harms the investment that all current homeowners have made.
If society thought of housing similarly to other large purchases like cars in that there was no expectation of profit, we would all be a lot better off.
Now what caused this housing as investment idea? I haven’t seen any research on this, but my guess would be as a form of forced retirement savings as it allows people to build net worth without the self-control normally required of saving. And the difficulty of that delayed gratification is really just human nature.
It's also the easiest way for most people to achieve high leverage. My friend got a $3000 down home loan in Colorado. $3k in for $450k. The leverage on that is astronomical. A 10% appreciation in value gives him 1500% growth in wealth, with no capital gains tax when realizing.
FWIW Calgary, AB is an example of tons of building doing a good job to manage housing cost increases. Something like tripled the population ~300k -> > 1M over 1990-2010s and house prices remained reasonable in the suburbs (which are still Calgary proper). One thing Calgary did well was "Infills" which basically was when someone would split their single family home into 2 properties, which may or may not share a wall. Sometimes they'd buy neighboring properties and do N parcels to N+1 (or >N) new homes. eg 2 neighboring parcels became 3 homes. Smoothly incrementing the density.
It could be a contributing factor, but SF seems to have more problems than other expensive cities with concentration of rich industries like Manhattan for finance or biotech/pharma in Boston and Cambridge. Maybe the rate at which income inequality changed is another part of this. There are probably also unhelpful policy differences in SF with respect to building more housing.
To what extent the crime policies contribute statistically I don't know, but for some of the more extreme mental illness cases (that disproportionately account for homeless people being actively aggressive), there is a disconnect between philosophical ideals and what practically would be better for everyone in the long run. Mental illness (especially when substance abuse is involved) can make someone resist help and they will be unlikely to improve unless they are forced into a facility. Where the line is for doing this is a tough question but if someone is routinely threatening people on the street or does something violent, it seems like SF policy is still opposed to it.
> SF seems to have more problems than other expensive cities with concentration of rich industries like Manhattan for finance or biotech/pharma in Boston and Cambridge.
I don't think people realize how much of an outlier SF is. Incomes are a good 25% or so higher than NYC and Boston. The percentage of the people who work in tech in SF isn't really comparably to any other city and their own high paying industries.
Though SF seems to have problems that Silicon Valley (defined as the area from Sand Hill to downtown San Jose) doesn't have. Mountain View, for example, has a big homelessness problem, but it doesn't really have a huge crime problem. The typical homeless family (and it's families in MTV, vs. drug addicts in SF) lives in an RV, has a single working parent, keeps to themselves, and does their best to send their kids to schools. SF schools are some of the worst in the nation, while Palo Alto schools are some of the best. San Mateo cops actually arrest people. All these places have a greater tech concentration, greater average incomes, and greater income disparity than SF, and geographically they're located just 50 miles south.
I think the problems with SF are largely cultural and political rather than technological or economic, though the economic issues are exacerbating it. It's an "anything goes" city and has been for 150+ years. The city values your ability to express yourself in any way you please, and that includes both healthy forms like street fairs, neighborhood scavenger hunts, or Bring Your Own Big Wheel, and less-healthy forms like being able to shit on the sidewalk when you please or stab someone who looks at you funny. And that filters down to the voting preferences of the electorate. You get what you ask for.
The South Bay has all the same problems of tech dominance, income inequality, insane housing prices, etc, but the cultural orientation is very different. People in the South Bay are generally there to work hard and build a better life for themselves and their descendants. Their time-orientation is much more long-term than SF culture. And that applies across the income spectrum - even poor, Hispanic, immigrant day-workers will do their best to make sure their kids do their homework. The type of tech industry that spills out of this also reflects this cultural orientation, with the South Bay doing much more foundational engineering research and SF being more focused on how to apply technical breakthroughs from 50 miles south in new and crazy ways.
It's impossible that a 100K techies descending into SF after 2010 could have any impact on anything like the 18000 SRO units that used to house all those folks in the Tenderloin. All that wealth sloshing into a city - gentrification is a liberal fantasy.
Of course, when you bring up Manhattanizing Mission, most of these "YIMBY" astro-turf types start screeching. They want theirs, and as soon as they get it they'll be pulling up the ladder behind them. But keep your filthy mittens off the Mission.
Ironically Austin’s housing market seems to have suffered the hardest since peak 2021-2022 prices because it’s more clear now that it isn’t becoming the next Silicon Valley.
There's this brewing sentiment in the rest of the US as California residents move out: please go away and keep your broken politics and social policies away from us.
I have family out in Idaho, and they complain that there a lot of folks from California moving there and screwing up the local politics by voting for policies that broke the state of California. They joke that the first thing people do is change their plates because they don't want anyone to know they're from Cali. I can't blame them, though, because it is an absolute train-wreck of a state whose condition is epitomized by SanFran.
Idaho's great, just don't be anything but white or straight, or god forbid don't be a trans kid since the state government just barely averted banning appropriate healthcare for teenagers there.
Plus they have a sweet setup since they're the 18th-most dependent state on Federal aid, so they'll glad take money from train-wreck states like California, they just don't want the people.
Is it so wrong for people to want to be left alone? We're talking a minority (which was the majority not too long ago) wanting to be left to their social and religious moors. The whole political mess in the US is driven by a clash of ideologies.
> don't be a trans kid since the state government just barely averted banning appropriate healthcare for teenagers
Case in point: many people in the United States disagree with surgically altering minors' genitalia, for whatever reason. And they'd prefer such policies to not be implemented where they live. This is part of the "please, just leave me alone" attitude.
More relevant to this topic (crime in SF): many people in the United States would prefer for crime to actually be punished, with punishments that are actually effective. Making it legal to loot up to 1000 USD in merch isn't going to deter crime, it does the opposite. Because the law is cancerous at this point, honest business ventures are closing up shop. People in other states see the cancer and (rightly, I think) say they don't want any part of it.
> The whole political mess in the US is driven by a clash of ideologies.
Not really. When you actually analyze the situation what you have is a bunch of folks who would like to just live their lives (you know, people who are gay, or non-white, or female.)
But there are some people who are upset by this, and want to stop it, who treat it like some battle for the soul of the Nation. They go out of their way to persecute and abuse other people for no reason other than they don't like them. Mostly they are members of various weird quasi-Christian religions.
So it's not really a "clash of ideologies" so much as it is attacks by radical religious people on anybody and everybody that won't toe their religeous/ideological belief systems.
Also don't be a woman, because there are barely any OB/GYNs there anymore since they can be prosecuted for a felony for practicing standard medical care -- and are responsible for proving that they weren't violating the law as opposed to the state having to prove that they were. They are also open to civil suits from any member of the family of a woman who loses a pregnancy under the care of a non-emergency physician. Many hospitals don't even do births anymore and will just ship you somewhere else.
You're begging the question. Reasonable, empathetic people are capable of thinking that "gender-affirming care" is an ideologically-driven phenomenon that does more harm than good.
> Plus they have a sweet setup since they're the 18th-most dependent state on Federal aid
Do you feel the same way about Virginia (second highest per capita federal balance of payments), New Mexico (4th), or Maine (9th)? They're all blue states that receive a lot more from the federal government than they pay in.
Do you also feel the same way about high income earners paying more than they get back? Because effectively that's what you're describing. California has a lot of high incomes and because the federal government does a lot of redistributing via taxation, the state as a whole pays more than it gets back. Though if you look at the per capita data[0], it works out to a few hundred bucks a year. It's also worth mentioning that since Covid, every single state has received more than it paid, and in aggregate California the most by far (which makes sense, since it's the most populous state). So California too has a sweet setup.
Implicit behind your sentiment is the idea that the "train-wreck" policies in California is causative of the high incomes that has it pay more than it gets back from the federal government. That is, your argument paraphrased is that conservative Idahoans can't criticize progressive Californians since California with its progressive policies has high incomes that pay for some of Idaho's bills via redistributed federal taxation. I find that assumption unpersuasive.
> Reasonable, empathetic people are capable of thinking that "gender-affirming care" is an ideologically-driven phenomenon that does more harm than good.
Reasonable, empathetic people who have no experience with an issue personally should mind their own damn business regarding other people's medical decisions, especially when they themselves are actually, demonstrably (not suspectedly) ideologically motivated.
>Reasonable, empathetic people who have no experience with an issue personally should mind their own damn business regarding other people's medical decisions, especially when they themselves are actually, demonstrably (not suspectedly) ideologically motivated.
Sorry, kids don't get to make medical decisions and adults don't get to make harmful decisions for them. Your rant is borderline suited to an adult, and no one else. Last, imagine couching anti-child castration and mutilation as "ideological". Competent adults label this position to as sanity.
First, that anyone not agreeing with your position is actually and demonstrably ideologically motivated. It may be one of the surest signs that your position is not based on reason, when you perceive it to be so blindingly clear that anyone disagreeing must have an ulterior motive. There's another commenter who said that the only way anyone could oppose their position is through stupidity, which is along the same vein.
Second, that people should mind their own damn business. I agree with this on principle, but it does have its limits. Am I wrong to be concerned about and disapproving of the practice of female genital mutilation in parts of the world? After all, it doesn't directly affect me one bit. I suppose you might consider me a cultural imperialist for thinking it a barbaric practice. Should I equally mind my own business if I see a neighbor routinely take opiates to the point of stupor? That's his medical decision, and one that I have no experience with personally.
At some point, the line between well-meaning non-judgmentalism and craven indifference is blurred. I want to help repair the social fabric in this country because I feel it is torn and tattered. The way to do that is through open dialogue on what I think is right and wrong. I can admit that this can be taken too far, and has been in the past on many matters. What you suggest is that I keep it to myself and don't condemn others, no matter what I see, because everyone walks in their own pair of shoes. I'm not convinced that this is the better way; at least one that doesn't end up in a world where everyone only cares about themselves.
To put another way: can you imagine a fast-spreading, medically-involved phenomenon that affects minors in the long term that you would be concerned about, even if you had no personal experience with it? Or is such a thing not possible in your view?
As parents, myself and my wife get to make medical decisions for our children until they become adults.
I saw a lot of push and propaganda in schools to subvert this setup, for my kids in the name of ideology. This is now the #1 issue for me to push back on. Just a single data point.
>Implicit behind your sentiment is the idea that the "train-wreck" policies in California is causative of the high incomes
Quite a straw man you built there! I hold no such opinion.
> Reasonable, empathetic people are capable of thinking that "gender-affirming care" is an ideologically-driven phenomenon
No reasonable, empathetic people that are in any genuine contact with trans kids are likely to feel this way, considering suicide rates and mental health outcomes of gender-affirming healthcare.
>Do you feel the same way about Virginia (second highest per capita federal balance of payments), New Mexico (4th), or Maine (9th)?
Are people from those states voicing the opinion that their states are well-function oases relative to the "train-wreck" that is California? I haven't heard much of it. Yet it's pretty common for red-state folks to rag on California as if their welfare governments aren't benefiting from our homofemitrans tax dollars.
> Reasonable, empathetic people are capable of thinking that "gender-affirming care" is an ideologically-driven phenomenon that does more harm than good.
The only way it is possible for a reasonable, empathetic person to believe that the state government banning GAC is good, is if they're stupid. Which is ok to some degree, many people are stupid.
If the point of gender affirming care (GAC) is to improve the mental health outcomes of the one being cared for, then it is a colossal waste of time. Mental health outcomes do not demonstrably improve after a person is placed on HRT and had their genitalia suitably modified. In fact, their long term health outcomes decline significantly later in life [0]. The suicide rate of transgender individuals is about 40%. This does not take into account whether they received GAC or not [1]. Per [0], even GAC does not improve late life all cause morbidity.
I oppose gender affirming care on the grounds that it does not effectively improve a person's life (which we can see over a 30 year period in [0]) and that it often requires damaging the delicate balance of the biological machine that is the human body.
If a teenage girl standing 5'7" and weighing 80 pounds came to the doctor and said she feels too fat and needs to lose weight, the doctor would rightly tell her that she is anorexic, that her being too fat is only in her head, and that she should instead gain a bit of weight to be healthy. A doctor who instead prescribes her weight loss pills would be treated with skepticism; a doctor who performed gastric bypass on her would rightly be excoriated and maybe even have their medical license taken away. If there was an epidemic of such doctors, voters would rightly take alarm and may even petition the state legislature to ban such a practice. None of this would be stupid.
NIMBY is an inherently local problem, and from what I've heard, that is at the heart of SF's issues: "you can't build affordable housing here, that will lower my property values"; "you can't build a big apartment building here, that will destroy the quaint local character".
I'm not saying that's a problem unique to SF, but SF can solve it without fixing the political issues that affect the rest of the country.
I'm in the treasure valley, I came up in the early aughts and even worked as an interstate mover for a time. I moved lots of Californians into Idaho who sold their house and came up here and bought two or three, or simply vastly upgraded their square footage and amenities. Something is different this time, maybe a critical mass has been reached but the change in culture and politics is apparent. Even in the smaller cities of the valley you see it, you hear it, I see stop white supremacy fliers around my little city. Keep in mind we were marching for Bernie Sanders in Boise not too long ago, he even came and did a rally. Boise and parts of the valley were always leftish, for as long as I've been here but it's different this time. It's more jarring. Again it's probably critical mass of certain ideologies or simply population densities but it's still different and really starting to change the culture across the valley. And not for the better in my opinion, I mentioned the fliers for instance well Hispanic and even African refugee relations have been good here. There's not a problem with white supremacy here but it's now being made manifest by outsiders... Why people can't leave well enough alone I'll never understand.
Are you talking about those kids doing donuts that circulated a few weeks back? That's super rare, I've lived here 20 years and never seen anything like that. Not saying that element isn't growing here, it has been, but this city is pretty dang safe.
A few weeks back? Not sure, but each video I see looks like they're new, so I'm only assuming that it's a regular occurance. To an outsider Austin looks pretty lawless on the roads.
Not that I know of, but there is a correlation between vehicle miles traveled and road deaths. Cars are big, heavy, and often move very fast. When cars collide with people, other cars, or built structures, it often results in deaths.
Pacific Northwest has loads of tech giants, move up here to the woods. No reason to live in Seattle, the big kids are over in the forest in Redmond (Microsoft, Valve, etc).
Seattle is very under appreciated imo. The pandemic didn’t do it any favors but it’s more affordable than the eastside suburbs with all the things you’d want from a city plus access to nature. Not everywhere is 3rd and Pike.
I agree. I live in the city and it would be more expensive to live on the east side. Public school quality in the city varies a lot, if you have young kids. The east side runs some really highly funded public schools.
Very sad to hear that. I loved this city when I lived there at the end of the nineties, although it was much more violent already than what I was accustomed to.
Sharing experience as someone who has lived in SF and around the Bay Area, and now has moved to another popular US city. At least pre-pandemic, there is a vibe difference, a sort of "magic" of having the expertise colocated (not necessarily in office though!). The best I can analogize it is imagine the networking value of being at a tech conference all the time. You'd meet people and they would know what you meant when you described your job, and you could have a conversation with them about it. Versus where I'm at now, people simply do not get it, you talk with them about tech things and their eyes glaze over, they discount you as "nerd" and usually remove themselves from the conversation. The sharing of ideas is far better than any online community (HN included) than I've ever experienced. It's hard to convey, you truly have to live it to feel the difference.
I don't mean to sound snarky, but... aren't we supposed to be valuing diversity above all else these days, and the idea of building a homogeneous community should be anathema?
FWIW, where I live (outside Austin, but I don't think that's specifically relevant), as you predict, I don't feel that everyone just understands exactly what my job is. On the other hand, I do feel like people are curious and eager to learn. I find (I know, just one datapoint) that whether I'm talking to somebody from our local semiconductor industry or a lifelong Texas rancher, there's some respect for the idea that we prosper by being a community from all walks of life.
ETA: I'm not necessarily talking about any kind of "protected class" of race/gender/whatever. I mean people that are rich and poor, Christian and Buddhist and atheist and whatever, techies and ranchers and oilmen, and so forth. In other words, people who really have different ways of interacting with the world, not just skin deep.
> aren't we supposed to be valuing diversity above all else these days,
Perhaps, but after years of you being the person who is not valued, precisely because you are 'diverse', the idea of a homogenous group is likely appealing. I don't quite count myself in there, but I do live in a rural area, and there aren't as many people in software as there are in other industries. I don't particularly get the sense that people who don't know what I do care to learn or are all that curious, on the whole.
+1 I wasn't intending to say all of SF/BA are tech people. I'm saying a noticeable difference in the number of people who are Tech aware and tech open minded.
I used to live at 8th/Mission, I have felt the difference you speak of and still I could never live there again. There is a cold, passive hostility there that you don't feel in other places.
I don't think the parent is arguing for SF, but for A place where tech is highly concentrated. I moved away from SF in 2013 and miss the tech focus all the time. I feel like I moved away from the center of the earth. I loved my time in SF, but likewise cannot imagine moving back due to all the problems around crime and crazy prizes due to NIMBYism. I'd love to live in a place like SF in the late 00s/early10s though.
I didn't feel safe in SF until maybe the mid-late 90s. SF was seriously a violent place until the tech boom. China Basin, where the ballpark is now, was one of the worst parts of the city.
A "safe" SF only existed for about 20 years total.
It’s like how all the glass makers lived on a single island in Italy during the Renaissance. I could be wrong, but advancements in telescopes, microscopes, and even beakers are somehow related to the glassmakers in Florence
Zoom and FaceTime won’t replicate this. The question is whether AR and VR can come close within 10 years?
I go back and forth around whether these dense communities of industry are bad or not. It certainly creates bubbles and echo chambers, but there's also a lot of real innovation that happens because there's a rich ecosystem of skilled people to hire to build things.
This is coming from someone who has never lived in SF.
You can hire people from anywhere with the internet. Economics alone are likely to dictate that things move from centralization to decentralization.
$3m dollar homes, extremely high office rents, wasted energy and time on commuting, higher comp expenses, smaller hiring pool. Even if centralization/in-person is more efficient, likely not efficient to enough to overcome these economics.
The businesses that learn how to maneuver in a decentralized/online first manner have huge starting advantages over those that don't. Though, we will see in time.
It's possible the centralization gap will be much smaller in cities that choose to meet demand for housing/office/amenities.
That only really applies to work that can be efficiently done remotely. While a lot of software can, there's a significant chunk that cannot and never will be able to. As soon as you have situations where you need specialized hardware, remote work becomes really inefficient/untenable.
True, though many types of hardware work can still be distributed.
More than one phone prototype can be made and shipped to different branch offices, for example. Do you need the entire company working off one hardware prototype? Is that even a practical way to iterate? Not really. It's only the more bespoke/expensive hardware that is more difficult to distribute.
But software employment is currently much larger percentage of the IT workforce anyway
Or centralize it in the Midwest and put it next to the work that enables us to eat and use diesel to make consumable calories. Columbus, Des Moines, Oklahoma City. This is the way.
I'm sorry, I'm sure this was an innocent typo, but seeing a "tech bro" mythologize the midwest and then misspell Oklahoma is just too funny. You realize OKC has a higher violent crime rate than SF right?
Oklahoma had the highest incarceration rate in the United States (or the world if you compared it to other countries). Most of the people in prison there are in for drug crimes.
I just think it's so bizarre watching people act as if Oklahoma of all places is a beacon of rational governance and domestic tranquility.
(Source: I grew up there and it's no different from most other places in the country. Our country's problems are dispersed fairly homogeneously. The opioid crisis is not limited to cities and neither is homelessness)
I don't know if people really comprehend that it's a national issue and not localized to any area. Inequality + years of segregation and neglect + drugs have been left to fester and our only tool against these issues has been a big boot.
Suburbanites are insulated by 20 miles of highway from the problematic areas and can't even fathom what it's like-- the talking heads on their TV are more real to them than whatever is happening in the inner city. But even then their kids are popping xanax and getting DUIs. They just have a better support system and can continue functioning in society instead of getting locked up. In rural areas too, there's so much drug crime and violent crime.
The unfortunate part is that our anti-poor propaganda works flawlessly even on the conventionally "smart" as we can see in threads like these.
What happens is SF doesn't have the traditional US organizational structure of 'heavily policed mall-like downtown -> elevated highway over poor neighborhoods -> suburbs' (like it or not, even NYC has turned into that with the gentrification of Manhattan and extreme Western Long Island).
So people see all that a city has to offer when they go to SF, while they'll never set foot in East New York.
For the most part, anywhere that Democrats have held TOTAL power for decades is a dump. They become more of a dump as the politics become more progressive and they hold even more power. We should acknowledge this. That having total Democrat control results in really bad places. They need to be challenged.
NYC is a great example. Was a dump until Giuliani came in and became the gold standard city when Bloomberg took over for 12 years. He called himself a Democrat at the end, but they all hated him because he was pragmatic and got shit done. There was a tension there though and it worked out well.
DeBlasio came in and almost immediately things started to turn. As SF has consolidated power it has just fell off the deep end. Chicago has this story going for 50 years.
> every midwestern city of any size is violent as fuck. STL, KC, Indy, Chicago, OKC
If there's nothing there, why are they so violent? Answer: they really aren't. If you've lived in a midwestern city you'd know that there are areas that have more violence (like probably any city) than others, but I would wager that proportionally they're much smaller compared to outlying metro areas than larger cities.
I've spent a few weeks in each of SF and Chicago. SF constantly felt worse/scarier/more tense.
Most of that time in both cities was in business and/or tourist districts. There are pockets of Chicago I would definitely avoid, but the core felt safe. In SF, the core does not feel safe.
Fixed. I’ve edited my reply a few times. I can’t imagine a tech-bro ever employing me. Given the baseline on the site it is not an unreasonable guess.
I don’t have a mythologized impression of the Midwest. I spent a lot of time working in emergency services in one of Ohio’s poorest counties before moving on.
I am familiar on a first person basis with the Columbus metro’s problems at a minimum. No, I don’t think New Albany or Upper Arlington are representative.
* Oklahoma had the highest incarceration rate in the United States (or the world if you compared it to other countries). Most of the people in prison there are in for drug crimes.*
At least in the Midwest the thugs have the courtesy to congregate in known bad areas.
I'm fully for that. I'm fully remote now and based in Asia (between HK and Taiwan). I much prefer tech to be decentralized. But if the hub is going to stay in the US and somewhat centralized, almost anything would be better than SF.
For that to happen, people need to accept more remote work related technologies like AR and VR. AR is still far away with NReal being the closest thing that’s usable. With VR, the device form factor is so intimidating to people that many refuse to even try it.
Or most cities for that matter. I keep hearing "but culture" and I scratch my head... is culture expensive bars, restaurants, breweries? Yes the museums and art galleries can be cool, but most people see those once every few years. Similar to concerts/live music, its easy to travel into a city a few times per year for an event. Otherwise, they seem far from vibrant. (I've lived in SF, NYC, and LA - and haven't been back since the pandemic).
Most Americans have no idea what "culture" is; they assume it refers exclusively to consumption, i.e. what is available to consume and how people prefer to consume it.
I wonder where it would move to? Does it seem a bit curious that a "rotten to the core" city would be so synonymous with the tech industry? Perhaps they are intertwined for a reason. Personally, I've never been there, but am somewhat curious to visit. Not so much after dark though.
Pacific Northwest already has a lot of giants, and no reason to live in Seattle itself. Microsoft, Valve, etc are over in the forested towns like Redmond. Nintendo is over in North Bend.
Valve is in Bellevue and Nintendo is next to the Microsoft campus in the outskirts of Redmond. There is nothing in North Bend (except Twin Peaks fans and hikers).
Yeah, you see a ton of people commuting from Seattle where they live because they want to be around culture to the east side to work because they have to
A causal relationship seems very difficult to establish here. Housing prices in SF are mostly due to the fact that it's very, very difficult to build more homes. High wages, even if it's concentrated in one particular sector, spreads out to the rest, since those high earners have to spend their money somewhere. The average hourly wage among all occupations in the SF area is almost 50% higher than the nationwide average; in food service, 35% higher.
Of course, none of this causes drug addiction and mental illness.
Massive income inequality is a root cause driver of a underclass that gets crushed under soaring costs and inability to pay for basics necessities like housing and healthcare.
…because of an utter lack of ability to build more housing.
The massive wealth brought by the tech industry could easily allow abundance. But when it’s impossible to build anything, it doesn’t matter how much money is raised via taxing that wealth, it just goes everywhere OTHER than building housing, which is needed desperately for lower income folk there and working class folk who do the work in healthcare.
A fixed amount of housing will just get bid up and up and up into the stratosphere. And for the progressive Boomer types who bought into the market decades ago and are now sitting on multimillion dollar property valuations, they will support any measure other than one which increases supply in a way that could reduce their property values (see Robert Reich). It’s a recipe for misery.
And Robert Reich is why I think that concern about inequality is not actually a productive route to fixing the problem. He’s one of THE greatest voices decrying inequality (and in the past I really agreed with a lot he had to say), and when push came to shove, he opposed new housing in his area (Berkeley) which could’ve threatened his household wealth. Be concerned about “community voice” and the power of existing homeowners (which in SF means millionaires or more) to oppose building housing.
Question those who question—under the guise of progressive (or conservative) goals—the creation of abundance. “Sure, you’re creating greater overall wealth that will help the vast majority of people, but the wrong people get most of the benefit.”
> Question those who question ... the creation of abundance
I cannot agree with you more on this point. The whole history of capitalism and all it depends on (rule of law, strong private property rights, laissez-faire economic policies) has been one of a rising tide lifting all boats.
Now in the developed world, material wealth has gotten to such a level that people in power are much more keen on divvying up the pie as they see fit than baking more pie. People have gotten myopic on this topic because they see more wealth than ever before; they question why we need to create more wealth, instead of spreading the existing wealth around? And that leads to precisely the kind of thinking you underlined: a further rising tide is bad, if some people end up in bigger yachts.
Increased housing costs don't cause drug addiction, but it does cause an increase in homelessness, and that does cause drug addiction, which in turn over time can cause mental illness or make it worse.
I think that's because our winters are brutal. Homeless people would rather live in a milder climate or a place like New York with a better public transportation system.
Well, that pretty much sounds like communism, atleast in practice. Majority is suffering while the leaders and a small group are ultra rich and lives in luxury, at the expense of workers and ordinary people.
Doesn't it make sense to aim at increasing wages at the lowest end, instead of targeting higher earners?
I get the sense that people in HN believe that most tech workers in the Bay Area are some sort of high rolling millionaires. They mostly are not, and the proof is that most are priced out of housing in SF too.
Saying that inequality is caused by tech workers is thus a myopic statement.
Anyone who spent considerable time in SF before the most recent tech boom would likely argue that it was the tech industry that caused the rot in the first place.
The foundation of safe cities is vibrant local communities with historic roots. Parts of the city where people choose to have and raise kids. Places with a sense of shared community where neighbors look out for each other.
The rapid influx of extremely high income individuals transformed SF over the course of the last decade. Uprooting those communities and replacing them with largely transient techworkers with no real interest in forming communities that don't help them to increase their TC and level up with their next new role.
Then when tech declines you really see the impact this has.
SF was treated as basically a luxury mall for rich tech workers to get whatever they want whenever they want. As tech workers start to leave it's no wonder the city feels like an abandoned mall.
Xenophobic natives pursued an anti-housing strategy in order to thwart what they perceived as tech workers getting too much of what they wanted. It just didn’t work. Tech workers could still pay the inflated rents that you decided we should have in the service of “community.” But no one else could. Then you turn around and blame us for the collateral damage you caused with this narcissistic “look what you made me do” attitude.
Americans are entitled to move within the United States. Always have been, always will be. You can keep trying for de facto migration controls all you want, but you will never be able to dial them in to curate exactly the population you want. It will always blow up in your face like this. That’s very, very good and it makes me damn proud to be an American. This isn’t the feudal system. We don’t allocative the best land to the people born on it. It’s insane that this ever became a left-coded position.
This claim isn't backed up by the demographic info of SF [0], and SF has historically been a very diverse, immigrant friendly city.
Percentage of US born (as well as specifically California born) residents of SF started to rise with the tech boom. The lowest number of US born residents of SF was 2000, it rose slightly by 2010 and continued to increase into 2020.
SF’s in-group is clearly not “white-bread American” but it absolutely has an in-group, an out-group, a sense of being overrun by the wrong kind of people, and a politics focused around defending its “original” territory, identity, and culture from the outsiders.
You're just describing a "community" and the "shared values that define them".
So I think we agree: tech people came in, attempted to displace the local community and trampled on their values (and claimed them "xenophobic" for resisting).
And now that the tech community is withdrawing what's left is a broken city without the community and shared values that once defined it.
The tech community wanted SF to be a shopping mall for rich tech workers, some parts of the community resisted being turned into a shopping mall, they lost and now SF is rotten.
US cities aren’t country clubs or coop buildings. You may think of yourselves as a “community” in some respects, but you aren’t entitled to require referrals, conduct culture fit interviews, or deliberate about whether to accept prospective members. The right to reside in the US is the right to reside in the US, and not just technically. This is good and important.
Trying to approximate these hukou-style controls through building permits is what created displacement - tech people just wanted places to live.
SF has definetly seen QoL drop like a stone, but how much of that is because techies now live in neighborhoods that used to be the ghettos until the early 2010s.
Like Hayes Valley used to be crack dens until Twitter money, Mission District was a Latino ghetto until FB money, and Portrero Hill and West Add were the African American projects. Plus Chinatown and Tenderloin had an active Triad and Vietnamese+Cambodian gang presence.
Now you see upper net worth people living in Hayes Valley, houses in Portrero go for millions, every new grad SWE getting a shithole studio within walking distance of DoLo Park, much of Polk St and northern Tenderloin is now classified as "Lower Nob Hill", and all the Triad members and Viet gangs got caught in the ICE dragnet or retired.
> Hayes Valley used to be crack dens until Twitter money, Mission District was a Latino ghetto until FB money, and Portrero Hill and West Add were the African American projects
I lived in Potrero hill and Hayes valley in the early 2000s and was no stranger to the mission.
It was bad then and pandemic made it worse.
So many closed shops on Market St/Union Square area.
Walk a few blocks West and Tenderloin looks like doomsday. Lines for soup kitchens, tents, drugged-up and mentally-ill people walking like Zombies.