14 ms·

In San Francisco and Rooting for a Tech Slowdown

57 points by akud 11y ago

WalterSear 11y ago
The non-tech parts of this town will be devastated by a tech slowdown. Absolutely destroyed.
- e40 11y ago
  How's that? They seemed to be OK before the crazy upswing.
  - WalterSear 11y ago
    Because that was before, obviously. Too much of the city relies on the tech economy now - the restaurants, the lyft/uber drivers, the building contractors, the dog walkers, the private school teachers.
    - untog 11y ago
      But it transitioned towards a reliance on tech before now, there's nothing to suggest it cannot transition away to something else.
      - Apocryphon 11y ago
        Biotech? Genentech will still be in South SF.
      - WalterSear 11y ago
        It certainly can and will. But not quickly, and with lot of suffering in the interim.
  - JumpCrisscross 11y ago
    The relative power structure won't meaningfully shift. Levels will just change. The guy whose 1% of this pie is meaningful today may find that it is unsustainable tomorrow. The gal who lives richly on her 10% of the pie may have to tighten a belt or two tomorrow, but it's unlikely to become be existential. More tangibly, city services will pull away from non-core areas, projects and services.
    - metanoia 11y ago
      I would argue that despite budget increases we have not seen an appreciable increase in operating service levels across the board - from transit to infrastructure to homeless outreach and everything in between. Hard to believe with a $9B (yes, billion) budget. [1] (Yes, there are capital expenditures happening that are quite visible but do we really need an extension of the slow T-line to Fishermans Wharf?) [1] - http://sfmayor.org/ftp/uploadedfiles/mayor/budget/SF_Budget_Book_FY_2015_16_and_2016_17_Final_WEB.pdf http://sfmayor.org/ftp/uploadedfiles/mayor/budget/SF_Budget_...
  - tonster 11y ago
    Well, I think the ones that were around before the tech influx will certainly be able to ride out slower times better than the restaurants/services that have come up as a direct result of the influx of tech folk.
- whatnotests 11y ago
  All the folks working in a service industry that exists only to service tech workers are going to have a very, very hard time. Q: How many sandwiches and burritos must one deliver to pay rent in the Bay Area? How many of those people that have been requesting said sandwiches and burritos will be laid off, move away or reduce discretionary spending? A: many.
  - adevine 11y ago
    I think this sentiment is exactly what gives tech workers a bad name: > All the folks working in a service industry that exists only to service tech workers are going to have a very, very hard time. "Only to service tech workers" - are you kidding? You sound like the aristocracy from Downton Abbey: "Thank god we exist to give all the peasants jobs to do."
    - rfrank 11y ago
      For real. What companies do people even refer to when they say "service industry that only exists to serve tech workers"? DoorDash and TaskRabbit and the other outsource your chores apps? The service industry and its workers will be just fine without them.
      - toomuchtodo 11y ago
        > The service industry and its workers will be just fine without them. If anything, the service industry would arguably be better without them, instead of service startups attempting to illegally classify workers as 1099 contractors in order to be more attractive financially to VCs expecting insane growth.
    - benten10 11y ago
      I like to call this the 'plantation owner defense'. Any mistreatment of other peoples can be justified by 'but they would be even WORSE without us.' The original plantation owner justification being that the 'workers' (ha, euphemism!) were wild savages in a wild land, and any kind of treatment they were put through HAD to be better than what they would otherwise go through. The other place I've seen this defense used regularly is in South Asia. People treat their servants and house workers really poorly there, and then the defense is 'sureee, they may be given the same food as we give our dogs and cats, but they would be DYINGGG of thirst and hunger in their villages without us.' Fortunately for most South Asians, more and more people are getting out of the situation where they are pretty much bonded laborers. It seems to me that things are going in the opposite direction in the US. I have a lot to thank the US for personally, but sometimes, I get this intense emotion of schadenfreude. The increasing wealth gap, the increasing racial hostilities, outright hate for anyone who doesn't happen to be in the 'in-group'. As an American, I would be terribly terrified. As a non American I am sometimes all 'HAA, you acted if you were above everything else, as if you were post-history. Now YOU bear the baggage of history the others have had to overcome'. My favorite are the techie-engineer-objective types. The HN Bros. I've been told over and over and over again how "history is over" and "nothing in history matters anymore because technology" and "context doesn't matter because not we have the means to establish absolute truth". Like literally. When you value technology over people, the process over the end goal, things will break. And they seem to be breaking. I am secretly glad, even though I am myself a part of this env, and might lose my livelihood too if things go South. ...Relevant to the article because it was meant to reflect how things seem to be for people outside the core bubble.
- waterlesscloud 11y ago
  Strangely enough, San Francisco was thriving 100 years before the computer chip even existed. Don't overestimate your importance. The world will move on without you.
  - DannyBee 11y ago
    Thriving? I think reasonable people disagree. The vast majority of people i've talked to think SF was a craphole 25 years ago. I think a lot of people have the golden age fallacy going on :)
    - waterlesscloud 11y ago
      I see you know absolutely nothing about the history of San Francisco.
      - DannyBee 11y ago
        So you don't think reasonable people can disagree about the quality of san francisco 25 years ago? Interesting. It's good to know it's an objective fact with only one possible answer.
    - e40 11y ago
      The vast majority of people i've talked to think SF was a craphole 25 years ago. Let's see, I've been in the area for 40 years and your comment couldn't be more wrong or uninformed.
      - DannyBee 11y ago
        Given it's an opinion, based on a lot of data, i don't see how you can think it can be uninformed. You are welcome to disagree with it of course. But, again, based on what i have, i suspect you may be in the minority. Time will tell, of course!
        waterlesscloud 11y ago
- jonknee 11y ago
  Devested with it, devastated without it. In summary it sucks to be on the lower rung of the economy.
  - WalterSear 11y ago
    The more devastation there is, the less of everything else there will be to go around. A tech downturn will just add to the misery.
bishnu 11y ago
I think people will be shocked by how little housing prices decrease if the startup economy experiences a downturn.
- api 11y ago
  Absolutely. Housing prices are like wages: very "sticky." Nobody wants to ever sell a house at a loss or drop their rent, so housing will sit idle on the market rather than take a write-down. The only way housing could conceivably fall (without intense depression-level pain) is if the entire rest of the economy inflated such that housing was reasonable. Everyone would be making six figures, a gallon of gas would be $6, a loaf of bread over $10, but housing would be reasonable again.
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    > Absolutely. Housing prices are like wages: very "sticky." Nobody wants to ever sell a house at a loss or drop their rent, so housing will sit idle on the market rather than take a write-down. Depends on how financially solvent you are to manage the upkeep (Principle, interest, prop tax, insurance) if your wages drop or you lose your job.
  - doseofreality 11y ago
    Yes, right. Housing can never fall. I've heard that one before.
    - sseveran 11y ago
      Demand has greatly outstripped supply in the bay area. Even with a moderate reduction in demand prices may still rise. http://blog.altosresearch.com/how-sustainable-are-the-exorbitant-bay-area-home-prices-and-rents/ http://blog.altosresearch.com/how-sustainable-are-the-exorbi...
    - api 11y ago
      Housing fell a little bit off the 2005 highs and the result was very nearly a total collapse of the financial system. The Fed and the government did everything they could to backstop housing (at the expense of housing affordability and banking system reform) and it's now permanently unaffordable. More accurately we could say that housing will never be allowed to fall. The entire economy will be sacrificed at the altar of home values. Homeowners vote more than non-homeowners, and so much investment capital is tied up in housing that a major fall in home values would destroy the financial system.
fiatmoney 11y ago
San Francisco is one massive "tech slowdown" (although I suppose more like a tech collapse, given the baseline level of employment further down in Silicon Valley) from turning into Detroit-on-the-Bay.
- maxxxxx 11y ago
  As long as the weather doesn't change, SF will be fine.
  - fiatmoney 11y ago
    The world is full of places with great weather & horrible governance.
- emcq 11y ago
  That's some very wishful thinking. You have rich people like Robin Williams or Michelle Pfeiffer living here unlike Detroit, not to name countless CEOs and retired VCs who wont disappear. As for the rest of us plebs, SF has survived many boom and bust cycles [0], unlike Detroit. [0] http://sfist.com/2015/10/07/san_francisco_has_always_been_a_pre.php http://sfist.com/2015/10/07/san_francisco_has_always_been_a_...
  - fiatmoney 11y ago
    There were rich people living in Detroit, until they moved to Grosse Point and such. Is San Francisco, the geographic-political entity, that attractive that people wouldn't move 10 miles to Daly City or Burlingame to escape the SF municipal government?
    - dang 11y ago
      The answer to that question is certainly yes.
thedevil 11y ago
When I lived in SF, the categorical hate towards tech workers (I was not a tech worker back then) was nothing like "mainstream". It was just a few extremists, a few protesters I might see in the news. I didn't actually know anyone like that. Journalists made it sound like a bigger thing than it was. It's been over 3 years though. Has the anti-tech-worker hate really gone mainstream or are journalists continuing to inflate it?
- econner 11y ago
  Journalists continue to inflate it. I actually think folks are coming around more and more to work with tech vs. categorically fighting against it. I think people have begun to see the systemic problems and work together on those. Then again I did encounter a guy riding his bike around Market St. the other day screaming "Kill the Techies." But that's once in 5 years.
- wsinks 11y ago
  I actually gave an interview to a reporter for NPR recently. I work for a major tech company. Here's what I told him: I don't feel the hatred, and I think reports of it are either from areas where I haven't been in (so single events that I missed) or it's not actually a problem. All of his questions were leading questions into people hating on tech workers. I hang out with people of middle class, both upper and lower, go work occasionally with poorer people, and have rubbed my shoulders with a couple richer tech elite. I feel like the chances are I would've experienced the hatred. So either I'm missing out on a lot (I don't think I am..) or they're overblown.
- rco8786 11y ago
  I lived there for the last 3 years. When I got there it was a thing but not huge. By the time I left I would definitely consider it mainstream.
spinlock 11y ago
One of the interesting side-effects of Sen. Fienstien's quest to keep high-rises out of San Francisco is that _all_ real estate is more expensive. There are many people here with similarly narrow ideas about how to protect what is "theirs." A great example would be the people who throw rocks at Google busses. Everyone on that buss can afford a car and would drive to work alone (maybe carpool) if they didn't have the busses to reduce congestion.
- software_radio 11y ago
  A better example is the Police who didn't arrest and prosecute the rock-throwers for "assault with a deadly weapon." They're also part of the problem.
- DannyBee 11y ago
  FWIW: A lot of those rock throwers were probably not in bad shape. That is because the real people being hurt were probably working their first or second job at the time that was happening, and didn't have time to throw rocks at buses because they'd get fired for not showing up to work.
  - xur17 11y ago
    Serious question: Who is getting hurt by Google driving people to work on buses. It seems like this reduces congestion, and helps the environment, which is good for everyone. What am I missing here?
    - jonknee 11y ago
      The issue was they're using public bus stops. It's not hard to picture why it's demeaning to be standing at the public infrastructure and see a fancy shuttle come and pick up "Google People" while you're left waiting to ride with the proletariat. Especially demeaning when the shuttle is in the way of the real bus. Imagine if the NYC subway had a special car for Wall Street workers that was much more comfortable.
      - 11y ago
beatpanda 11y ago
For the love of God, move your company somewhere else. You don't have "easy access to capital" as an excuse anymore. You could locate literally anywhere. Stop coming here. Thank you.
Apocryphon 11y ago
Tech workers are not to blame, but tech workers shouldn't blame those angry at getting priced out, either. Instead, both groups should work together to lobby for more housing. So the question is, how can a hacker help?
- dublinben 11y ago
  >how can a hacker help? Help make remote work more possible and acceptable.
  - briandear 11y ago
    This this THIS! I live on two acres in the South of France. If I couldn't work remotely I'd be in San Francisco like the rest. So my three kids go to a small village school, I rarely drive the car and I paid as much for my place as I would have an apartment in San Fran.
bonniemuffin 11y ago
I question the author's fact-checking abilities when the article starts with the statement "the city officially gave the shuttles free rein to use public bus stops". Actually, the shuttles can only use 200 out of 2500+ muni stops and have a plethora of other restrictions. That doesn't seem like "free rein" to me. See https://www.sfmta.com/projects-planning/projects/commuter-shuttles-policy-and-pilot-program https://www.sfmta.com/projects-planning/projects/commuter-sh... for full program details, and http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/San-Francisco-Muni-Approves-Commuter-Shuttle-Bus-Pilot-Program-241401511.html http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/San-Francisco-Muni-Appr... for a reference on the "200 out of 2500" statistic.
- Cyclone_ 11y ago
  That just tells me the author most likely is in favor of making the tech companies look bad even if it means distorting the truth.
dreamdu5t 11y ago
Please stop posting this drivel. It's like listening to a broken record. Shut. Up.
guyzero 11y ago
Terrible public transit. A lifeless housing policy that's out of touch with local needs. Police rousting people out of one homeless encampment and then the same people just setting up a new camp a few blocks away. Racially charged police shootings. And the problem is workers at tech companies.
equalarrow 11y ago
The overall gist of this article to me seems like a similar SF argument: let's keep the city the way it was. Let's not build more housing, let's not build up, let's not move forward into the future. Obviously, this isn't how a city moves forward and grows. Peskin is not necessarily a bad guy.. I agree with him on some things, but neighborhood preservation is not one. It's easy to single out tech in all of this, but the prior non-tech landlords have a lot of blame on this. Sure, market dictates pricing and the large tech community has been willing to let the prices go up. (Mind you, this isn't just real estate, but also food.) But, I feel like, as someone in tech not able to afford buying _today_, I'd rather have the city moving forward vs. stagnant just so another group of people can live here. I appreciate diversity and my wife and I have talked for a few years of where else we should move to. Portland? Seattle? Austin? But, SF seems to have the right mix of diversity (more or less), compact city-ness (like NYC), close to a lot of great outdoors, and a lot of other things. We just keep coming back to SF has pretty much all the boxes checked off for us, even if it's in this crazy inflated market right now. Nothing lasts forever and we will probably get some kind of housing correction. But look a look back historically will show that you can't buy a house anywhere (at least in the bay area) for $20k, like our parents did. To think that things should stand still and stay fixed is just ignoring how reality works for cities that keep growing.. Maybe this will all go away once we have no need for money like in Star Trek. But today, this isn't the case.
- YuriNiyazov 11y ago
  The idea that "the future" is a megapolis that needs to be built up really needs to be defended a bit more. Historically, the dense megapolis has been the future, but that might have just be an accident of technology's evolution. Why can't Earth be densely covered with smallish cities like current Berkeley and San Francisco?
rco8786 11y ago
Agree with a lot of this, but it seems odd that parents are worried about children getting hit by a bus. Are there not school bus stops in front of every school?
chvid 11y ago
How about: let's root for interest rates to go up by 5 percentage points or so.
the_watcher 11y ago
Very few people who are being remotely rational disagree that techs relationship with San Francisco couldn't be improved. That said, relying on rental prices to justify an argument that tech is the root cause of the issues and ignoring that the only adequate solution - building more housing - is primarily opposed by exactly the same people is the height of hypocrisy.
vishalzone2002 11y ago
i think a viable solution would be to look at internal structures of companies and really find out teams and departments that could function from a remote location. It could be tech or product or even HR. And move them to different office locations distributed at a wider spread to avoid one epicenter for influx of population.. Not sure if some company tried thinking in this way..
capkutay 11y ago
I can't stand obstructionist politicians, but I also don't buy the argument that SF is not 'moving forward'. It's also building a significant amount of housing and getting over its fear of heights. There are 3 districts in SF getting significant up zoning. This is what SF's downtown will look like in 3 years: http://i.imgur.com/mcJf5zK.jpg http://i.imgur.com/mcJf5zK.jpg

57 points by akud 11y ago

WalterSear 11y ago

The non-tech parts of this town will be devastated by a tech slowdown. Absolutely destroyed.

e40 11y ago
How's that? They seemed to be OK before the crazy upswing.
- WalterSear 11y ago
  Because that was before, obviously. Too much of the city relies on the tech economy now - the restaurants, the lyft/uber drivers, the building contractors, the dog walkers, the private school teachers.
  - untog 11y ago
    But it transitioned towards a reliance on tech before now, there's nothing to suggest it cannot transition away to something else.
    - Apocryphon 11y ago
      Biotech? Genentech will still be in South SF.
    - WalterSear 11y ago
      It certainly can and will. But not quickly, and with lot of suffering in the interim.
- JumpCrisscross 11y ago
  The relative power structure won't meaningfully shift. Levels will just change. The guy whose 1% of this pie is meaningful today may find that it is unsustainable tomorrow. The gal who lives richly on her 10% of the pie may have to tighten a belt or two tomorrow, but it's unlikely to become be existential. More tangibly, city services will pull away from non-core areas, projects and services.
  - metanoia 11y ago
    I would argue that despite budget increases we have not seen an appreciable increase in operating service levels across the board - from transit to infrastructure to homeless outreach and everything in between. Hard to believe with a $9B (yes, billion) budget. [1] (Yes, there are capital expenditures happening that are quite visible but do we really need an extension of the slow T-line to Fishermans Wharf?) [1] - http://sfmayor.org/ftp/uploadedfiles/mayor/budget/SF_Budget_Book_FY_2015_16_and_2016_17_Final_WEB.pdf http://sfmayor.org/ftp/uploadedfiles/mayor/budget/SF_Budget_...
- tonster 11y ago
  Well, I think the ones that were around before the tech influx will certainly be able to ride out slower times better than the restaurants/services that have come up as a direct result of the influx of tech folk.
whatnotests 11y ago
All the folks working in a service industry that exists only to service tech workers are going to have a very, very hard time. Q: How many sandwiches and burritos must one deliver to pay rent in the Bay Area? How many of those people that have been requesting said sandwiches and burritos will be laid off, move away or reduce discretionary spending? A: many.
- adevine 11y ago
  I think this sentiment is exactly what gives tech workers a bad name: > All the folks working in a service industry that exists only to service tech workers are going to have a very, very hard time. "Only to service tech workers" - are you kidding? You sound like the aristocracy from Downton Abbey: "Thank god we exist to give all the peasants jobs to do."
  - rfrank 11y ago
    For real. What companies do people even refer to when they say "service industry that only exists to serve tech workers"? DoorDash and TaskRabbit and the other outsource your chores apps? The service industry and its workers will be just fine without them.
    - toomuchtodo 11y ago
      > The service industry and its workers will be just fine without them. If anything, the service industry would arguably be better without them, instead of service startups attempting to illegally classify workers as 1099 contractors in order to be more attractive financially to VCs expecting insane growth.
  - benten10 11y ago
    I like to call this the 'plantation owner defense'. Any mistreatment of other peoples can be justified by 'but they would be even WORSE without us.' The original plantation owner justification being that the 'workers' (ha, euphemism!) were wild savages in a wild land, and any kind of treatment they were put through HAD to be better than what they would otherwise go through. The other place I've seen this defense used regularly is in South Asia. People treat their servants and house workers really poorly there, and then the defense is 'sureee, they may be given the same food as we give our dogs and cats, but they would be DYINGGG of thirst and hunger in their villages without us.' Fortunately for most South Asians, more and more people are getting out of the situation where they are pretty much bonded laborers. It seems to me that things are going in the opposite direction in the US. I have a lot to thank the US for personally, but sometimes, I get this intense emotion of schadenfreude. The increasing wealth gap, the increasing racial hostilities, outright hate for anyone who doesn't happen to be in the 'in-group'. As an American, I would be terribly terrified. As a non American I am sometimes all 'HAA, you acted if you were above everything else, as if you were post-history. Now YOU bear the baggage of history the others have had to overcome'. My favorite are the techie-engineer-objective types. The HN Bros. I've been told over and over and over again how "history is over" and "nothing in history matters anymore because technology" and "context doesn't matter because not we have the means to establish absolute truth". Like literally. When you value technology over people, the process over the end goal, things will break. And they seem to be breaking. I am secretly glad, even though I am myself a part of this env, and might lose my livelihood too if things go South. ...Relevant to the article because it was meant to reflect how things seem to be for people outside the core bubble.
waterlesscloud 11y ago
Strangely enough, San Francisco was thriving 100 years before the computer chip even existed. Don't overestimate your importance. The world will move on without you.
- DannyBee 11y ago
  Thriving? I think reasonable people disagree. The vast majority of people i've talked to think SF was a craphole 25 years ago. I think a lot of people have the golden age fallacy going on :)
  - waterlesscloud 11y ago
    I see you know absolutely nothing about the history of San Francisco.
    - DannyBee 11y ago
      So you don't think reasonable people can disagree about the quality of san francisco 25 years ago? Interesting. It's good to know it's an objective fact with only one possible answer.
  - e40 11y ago
    The vast majority of people i've talked to think SF was a craphole 25 years ago. Let's see, I've been in the area for 40 years and your comment couldn't be more wrong or uninformed.
    - DannyBee 11y ago
      Given it's an opinion, based on a lot of data, i don't see how you can think it can be uninformed. You are welcome to disagree with it of course. But, again, based on what i have, i suspect you may be in the minority. Time will tell, of course!
      - waterlesscloud 11y ago
jonknee 11y ago
Devested with it, devastated without it. In summary it sucks to be on the lower rung of the economy.
- WalterSear 11y ago
  The more devastation there is, the less of everything else there will be to go around. A tech downturn will just add to the misery.

bishnu 11y ago

I think people will be shocked by how little housing prices decrease if the startup economy experiences a downturn.

api 11y ago
Absolutely. Housing prices are like wages: very "sticky." Nobody wants to ever sell a house at a loss or drop their rent, so housing will sit idle on the market rather than take a write-down. The only way housing could conceivably fall (without intense depression-level pain) is if the entire rest of the economy inflated such that housing was reasonable. Everyone would be making six figures, a gallon of gas would be $6, a loaf of bread over $10, but housing would be reasonable again.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  > Absolutely. Housing prices are like wages: very "sticky." Nobody wants to ever sell a house at a loss or drop their rent, so housing will sit idle on the market rather than take a write-down. Depends on how financially solvent you are to manage the upkeep (Principle, interest, prop tax, insurance) if your wages drop or you lose your job.
- doseofreality 11y ago
  Yes, right. Housing can never fall. I've heard that one before.
  - sseveran 11y ago
    Demand has greatly outstripped supply in the bay area. Even with a moderate reduction in demand prices may still rise. http://blog.altosresearch.com/how-sustainable-are-the-exorbitant-bay-area-home-prices-and-rents/ http://blog.altosresearch.com/how-sustainable-are-the-exorbi...
  - api 11y ago
    Housing fell a little bit off the 2005 highs and the result was very nearly a total collapse of the financial system. The Fed and the government did everything they could to backstop housing (at the expense of housing affordability and banking system reform) and it's now permanently unaffordable. More accurately we could say that housing will never be allowed to fall. The entire economy will be sacrificed at the altar of home values. Homeowners vote more than non-homeowners, and so much investment capital is tied up in housing that a major fall in home values would destroy the financial system.

fiatmoney 11y ago

San Francisco is one massive "tech slowdown" (although I suppose more like a tech collapse, given the baseline level of employment further down in Silicon Valley) from turning into Detroit-on-the-Bay.

maxxxxx 11y ago
As long as the weather doesn't change, SF will be fine.
- fiatmoney 11y ago
  The world is full of places with great weather & horrible governance.
emcq 11y ago
That's some very wishful thinking. You have rich people like Robin Williams or Michelle Pfeiffer living here unlike Detroit, not to name countless CEOs and retired VCs who wont disappear. As for the rest of us plebs, SF has survived many boom and bust cycles [0], unlike Detroit. [0] http://sfist.com/2015/10/07/san_francisco_has_always_been_a_pre.php http://sfist.com/2015/10/07/san_francisco_has_always_been_a_...
- fiatmoney 11y ago
  There were rich people living in Detroit, until they moved to Grosse Point and such. Is San Francisco, the geographic-political entity, that attractive that people wouldn't move 10 miles to Daly City or Burlingame to escape the SF municipal government?
  - dang 11y ago
    The answer to that question is certainly yes.

thedevil 11y ago

When I lived in SF, the categorical hate towards tech workers (I was not a tech worker back then) was nothing like "mainstream". It was just a few extremists, a few protesters I might see in the news. I didn't actually know anyone like that. Journalists made it sound like a bigger thing than it was. It's been over 3 years though. Has the anti-tech-worker hate really gone mainstream or are journalists continuing to inflate it?

econner 11y ago
Journalists continue to inflate it. I actually think folks are coming around more and more to work with tech vs. categorically fighting against it. I think people have begun to see the systemic problems and work together on those. Then again I did encounter a guy riding his bike around Market St. the other day screaming "Kill the Techies." But that's once in 5 years.
wsinks 11y ago
I actually gave an interview to a reporter for NPR recently. I work for a major tech company. Here's what I told him: I don't feel the hatred, and I think reports of it are either from areas where I haven't been in (so single events that I missed) or it's not actually a problem. All of his questions were leading questions into people hating on tech workers. I hang out with people of middle class, both upper and lower, go work occasionally with poorer people, and have rubbed my shoulders with a couple richer tech elite. I feel like the chances are I would've experienced the hatred. So either I'm missing out on a lot (I don't think I am..) or they're overblown.
rco8786 11y ago
I lived there for the last 3 years. When I got there it was a thing but not huge. By the time I left I would definitely consider it mainstream.

spinlock 11y ago

One of the interesting side-effects of Sen. Fienstien's quest to keep high-rises out of San Francisco is that _all_ real estate is more expensive. There are many people here with similarly narrow ideas about how to protect what is "theirs." A great example would be the people who throw rocks at Google busses. Everyone on that buss can afford a car and would drive to work alone (maybe carpool) if they didn't have the busses to reduce congestion.

software_radio 11y ago
A better example is the Police who didn't arrest and prosecute the rock-throwers for "assault with a deadly weapon." They're also part of the problem.
DannyBee 11y ago
FWIW: A lot of those rock throwers were probably not in bad shape. That is because the real people being hurt were probably working their first or second job at the time that was happening, and didn't have time to throw rocks at buses because they'd get fired for not showing up to work.
- xur17 11y ago
  Serious question: Who is getting hurt by Google driving people to work on buses. It seems like this reduces congestion, and helps the environment, which is good for everyone. What am I missing here?
  - jonknee 11y ago
    The issue was they're using public bus stops. It's not hard to picture why it's demeaning to be standing at the public infrastructure and see a fancy shuttle come and pick up "Google People" while you're left waiting to ride with the proletariat. Especially demeaning when the shuttle is in the way of the real bus. Imagine if the NYC subway had a special car for Wall Street workers that was much more comfortable.
    - 11y ago

beatpanda 11y ago

For the love of God, move your company somewhere else. You don't have "easy access to capital" as an excuse anymore. You could locate literally anywhere. Stop coming here. Thank you.

Apocryphon 11y ago

Tech workers are not to blame, but tech workers shouldn't blame those angry at getting priced out, either. Instead, both groups should work together to lobby for more housing. So the question is, how can a hacker help?

dublinben 11y ago
>how can a hacker help? Help make remote work more possible and acceptable.
- briandear 11y ago
  This this THIS! I live on two acres in the South of France. If I couldn't work remotely I'd be in San Francisco like the rest. So my three kids go to a small village school, I rarely drive the car and I paid as much for my place as I would have an apartment in San Fran.

bonniemuffin 11y ago

I question the author's fact-checking abilities when the article starts with the statement "the city officially gave the shuttles free rein to use public bus stops". Actually, the shuttles can only use 200 out of 2500+ muni stops and have a plethora of other restrictions. That doesn't seem like "free rein" to me. See https://www.sfmta.com/projects-planning/projects/commuter-shuttles-policy-and-pilot-program https://www.sfmta.com/projects-planning/projects/commuter-sh... for full program details, and http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/San-Francisco-Muni-Approves-Commuter-Shuttle-Bus-Pilot-Program-241401511.html http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/San-Francisco-Muni-Appr... for a reference on the "200 out of 2500" statistic.

Cyclone_ 11y ago
That just tells me the author most likely is in favor of making the tech companies look bad even if it means distorting the truth.

dreamdu5t 11y ago

Please stop posting this drivel. It's like listening to a broken record. Shut. Up.

guyzero 11y ago

Terrible public transit. A lifeless housing policy that's out of touch with local needs. Police rousting people out of one homeless encampment and then the same people just setting up a new camp a few blocks away. Racially charged police shootings. And the problem is workers at tech companies.

equalarrow 11y ago

The overall gist of this article to me seems like a similar SF argument: let's keep the city the way it was. Let's not build more housing, let's not build up, let's not move forward into the future. Obviously, this isn't how a city moves forward and grows. Peskin is not necessarily a bad guy.. I agree with him on some things, but neighborhood preservation is not one. It's easy to single out tech in all of this, but the prior non-tech landlords have a lot of blame on this. Sure, market dictates pricing and the large tech community has been willing to let the prices go up. (Mind you, this isn't just real estate, but also food.) But, I feel like, as someone in tech not able to afford buying _today_, I'd rather have the city moving forward vs. stagnant just so another group of people can live here. I appreciate diversity and my wife and I have talked for a few years of where else we should move to. Portland? Seattle? Austin? But, SF seems to have the right mix of diversity (more or less), compact city-ness (like NYC), close to a lot of great outdoors, and a lot of other things. We just keep coming back to SF has pretty much all the boxes checked off for us, even if it's in this crazy inflated market right now. Nothing lasts forever and we will probably get some kind of housing correction. But look a look back historically will show that you can't buy a house anywhere (at least in the bay area) for $20k, like our parents did. To think that things should stand still and stay fixed is just ignoring how reality works for cities that keep growing.. Maybe this will all go away once we have no need for money like in Star Trek. But today, this isn't the case.

YuriNiyazov 11y ago
The idea that "the future" is a megapolis that needs to be built up really needs to be defended a bit more. Historically, the dense megapolis has been the future, but that might have just be an accident of technology's evolution. Why can't Earth be densely covered with smallish cities like current Berkeley and San Francisco?

rco8786 11y ago

Agree with a lot of this, but it seems odd that parents are worried about children getting hit by a bus. Are there not school bus stops in front of every school?

chvid 11y ago

How about: let's root for interest rates to go up by 5 percentage points or so.

the_watcher 11y ago

Very few people who are being remotely rational disagree that techs relationship with San Francisco couldn't be improved. That said, relying on rental prices to justify an argument that tech is the root cause of the issues and ignoring that the only adequate solution - building more housing - is primarily opposed by exactly the same people is the height of hypocrisy.

vishalzone2002 11y ago

i think a viable solution would be to look at internal structures of companies and really find out teams and departments that could function from a remote location. It could be tech or product or even HR. And move them to different office locations distributed at a wider spread to avoid one epicenter for influx of population.. Not sure if some company tried thinking in this way..

capkutay 11y ago

I can't stand obstructionist politicians, but I also don't buy the argument that SF is not 'moving forward'. It's also building a significant amount of housing and getting over its fear of heights. There are 3 districts in SF getting significant up zoning. This is what SF's downtown will look like in 3 years: http://i.imgur.com/mcJf5zK.jpg http://i.imgur.com/mcJf5zK.jpg