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by time_to_smile 1163 days ago
> Xenophobic natives

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.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_San_Francisco

1 comments

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.