7 ms·

I hope you have to try living in Mountain View on a minimum wage salary.

angstrom 11y ago
The first mistake would be to think you can. Same reason I don't have a second home on Martha's Vineyard or the Hamptons.
- pc86 11y ago
  If it's not a great social injustice that you can't buy a house in the Hamptons, why is it a great social injustice for a gas station clerk not to be able to buy or rent in SF proper?
  - fixermark 11y ago
    The injustice creeps in when that gas station clerk was successfully renting for twenty years of their life, and one day their home becomes unaffordable to them because the property values in their town have risen but the economic value of "vending gas" has not. (Hard to say what the just solution is though. As a first-pass filter, changing the rules so people don't have to rent for twenty years might be useful, if there's a practical way to succeed at that).
    - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      Because 'life is hard' doesn't mean everything has to be fixed. If we're in a market economy, sometimes people who rent find their apartment to be unaffordable. So they more. That's sad. But not a reason to jigger the entire economy.
      - fixermark 11y ago
        "Life is hard" is the clarion song of someone who doesn't yet live in the time where society has solved the problem they see. Life was hard when we had to forage for food. Life was hard when infant mortality was massive worldwide. Life was hard when we didn't have a cure for polio. Life was hard when the economically disadvantaged generally just quietly died out because no programs existed to help them over a bad chunk of time. And life is now hard when you get cancer, lose your job, or are forced to move because the economics of your town have changed and you can't afford to live there anymore. Worth noting is that sometimes, these three are inter-related. ;) The hard things are not fixed in stone; they are challenges to be solved. That's why we bother with society; if it weren't worth our time to take on the hard stuff, we'd have stuck with hunter-gatherer life style because it's a lot structurally simpler.
        JoeAltmaier 11y ago
        And, again, if we're in a market economy then sometimes people have to move. Not a societal problem. In fact, very much a first-world problem.
        quinnchr 11y ago
        No, actually gentrification can occur in developing countries as well. Finding ways to rationalize the negative effects of gentrification is the first world problem.
        Grishnakh 11y ago
        The hunter-gatherer lifestyle is superior to everything that came after it, on average for most people. Evidence shows that hunter-gatherer people were much taller (a full foot) than their ancestors who turned to agriculture. It's only been in recent years that we've finally caught up with the heights hunter-gatherers reached: that's around 10,000 years that we've been deficient. The reason we didn't stick with the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is because we humans became overpopulated and ran out of resources. Agriculture was the only way to survive, because growing crops on a farm and herding domesticized prey animals is much more efficient than hunting and gathering in the wild. But it's also a lot more work and has a lot of problems with disease and malnutrition (potatoes and rice have terrible nutritional value by themselves). Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had generally superior and happier lifestyles, but they were living in an age when they didn't have a lot of competition for resources; it was like a "garden of Eden". The natives of Hawaii (before European contact) are probably one of the closest cultures in modern times to this.
        fixermark 11y ago
        On the other hand, we were willing to trade away a lot for a more predictable food supply, apparently. Even the threat of agricultural mass-starvation hasn't caused us to tear up the farms and start roaming the forests.
        Grishnakh 11y ago
    - SCHiM 11y ago
      I'm sympathetic to the clerk's plight, but I don't think we should be making exceptions at this stage. People agreed to rent, perhaps they had no other choice, perhaps they where forced by factors outside their control. But those things happen. When I was younger I had a dear friend move away because his parents got a better paying job somewhere else. It's the same sentiment, he had his roots there and still had to move (if for other reasons than not being able to pay rent). The short of the story is that when entering into a contract you should switch to a mercenary mode, and get the best deal you could possibly make. Don't lay down roots if you don't own your house. Buy don't rent, etc. ps, does anyone know the(an) average commute time for someone who is not able to afford a living place next to their employer in these areas?
    - pc86 11y ago
      The situation you describe doesn't sound like an injustice at all. They can't afford rent. It's one thing to make an argument about a retiree who owns their home in full but is forced to leave because they can't afford property taxes. It's something else entirely to say it's an injustice that someone can't continue living in someone else's house because it happens to be too expensive. And anyway, sometimes renting is cheaper than buying. It's not inherently bad and there are certainly circumstances where it makes sense to rent for decades at a time.
      - fixermark 11y ago
        Why is the situation you've described fundamentally different than the situation I've described? Individual on a fixed income that is too low to pay the cost of living in their home and must therefore move, because the fact that the local economy has improved (making things more expensive) doesn't imply their income improves to match it.
aetherson 11y ago
Nobody "has" to try living in Mountain View. It's not like commuting to Mountain View from Sunnyvale or Santa Clara or, hell, San Jose is some kind of unbearable hardship. Where does this right to live exactly where you want to end? I'm a fairly wealthy software developer who lives in San Francisco, but I can't afford a home in Monterey Heights. If it's rank injustice for someone poorer than me to not be able to afford my neighborhood (Outer Mission) and they have to move to Daly City, is it also rank injustice for me not to be able to live in a swankier neighborhood? What if I really just want that house over there? Can I do that? These are serious questions -- I genuinely don't know where this line is supposed to be drawn.
- mbrock 11y ago
  Resisting gentrification is not about the right to live "exactly where you want." Often it's about the ability to keep paying an increasing rent in an apartment where you've lived for many years. It's also about entire city cores becoming entirely reserved for wealthy people. That doesn't mean lower income people want to point at a house and say "gimme." Doesn't have anything to do with wanting to live somewhere "swanky." Often it's about neighborhoods transforming from "livable and affordable" to "swanky," which increases landlord profits and is very nice for wealthy people, but also destroys communities. Aside from that, there are the larger questions... like, how the whole gentrification process is tied up with income distribution... we software developers tend to be relatively wealthy, because of market forces, and this money becomes a powerful reason for landlords to keep increasing rents... etc etc...
  - raldi 11y ago
    > It's also about entire city cores becoming entirely reserved for wealthy people. If that were true, rent control and Prop 13 would have means-testing, and leave seniority completely out of the equation. Because they do not, they're actually about benefitting the establishment (even if wealthy) at the expense of newcomers (even if poor).
    - mbrock 11y ago

The first mistake would be to think you can. Same reason I don't have a second home on Martha's Vineyard or the Hamptons.

pc86 11y ago
If it's not a great social injustice that you can't buy a house in the Hamptons, why is it a great social injustice for a gas station clerk not to be able to buy or rent in SF proper?
- fixermark 11y ago
  The injustice creeps in when that gas station clerk was successfully renting for twenty years of their life, and one day their home becomes unaffordable to them because the property values in their town have risen but the economic value of "vending gas" has not. (Hard to say what the just solution is though. As a first-pass filter, changing the rules so people don't have to rent for twenty years might be useful, if there's a practical way to succeed at that).
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    Because 'life is hard' doesn't mean everything has to be fixed. If we're in a market economy, sometimes people who rent find their apartment to be unaffordable. So they more. That's sad. But not a reason to jigger the entire economy.
    - fixermark 11y ago
      "Life is hard" is the clarion song of someone who doesn't yet live in the time where society has solved the problem they see. Life was hard when we had to forage for food. Life was hard when infant mortality was massive worldwide. Life was hard when we didn't have a cure for polio. Life was hard when the economically disadvantaged generally just quietly died out because no programs existed to help them over a bad chunk of time. And life is now hard when you get cancer, lose your job, or are forced to move because the economics of your town have changed and you can't afford to live there anymore. Worth noting is that sometimes, these three are inter-related. ;) The hard things are not fixed in stone; they are challenges to be solved. That's why we bother with society; if it weren't worth our time to take on the hard stuff, we'd have stuck with hunter-gatherer life style because it's a lot structurally simpler.
      - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
        And, again, if we're in a market economy then sometimes people have to move. Not a societal problem. In fact, very much a first-world problem.
        quinnchr 11y ago
        No, actually gentrification can occur in developing countries as well. Finding ways to rationalize the negative effects of gentrification is the first world problem.
      - Grishnakh 11y ago
        The hunter-gatherer lifestyle is superior to everything that came after it, on average for most people. Evidence shows that hunter-gatherer people were much taller (a full foot) than their ancestors who turned to agriculture. It's only been in recent years that we've finally caught up with the heights hunter-gatherers reached: that's around 10,000 years that we've been deficient. The reason we didn't stick with the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is because we humans became overpopulated and ran out of resources. Agriculture was the only way to survive, because growing crops on a farm and herding domesticized prey animals is much more efficient than hunting and gathering in the wild. But it's also a lot more work and has a lot of problems with disease and malnutrition (potatoes and rice have terrible nutritional value by themselves). Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had generally superior and happier lifestyles, but they were living in an age when they didn't have a lot of competition for resources; it was like a "garden of Eden". The natives of Hawaii (before European contact) are probably one of the closest cultures in modern times to this.
        fixermark 11y ago
        On the other hand, we were willing to trade away a lot for a more predictable food supply, apparently. Even the threat of agricultural mass-starvation hasn't caused us to tear up the farms and start roaming the forests.
        Grishnakh 11y ago
  - SCHiM 11y ago
    I'm sympathetic to the clerk's plight, but I don't think we should be making exceptions at this stage. People agreed to rent, perhaps they had no other choice, perhaps they where forced by factors outside their control. But those things happen. When I was younger I had a dear friend move away because his parents got a better paying job somewhere else. It's the same sentiment, he had his roots there and still had to move (if for other reasons than not being able to pay rent). The short of the story is that when entering into a contract you should switch to a mercenary mode, and get the best deal you could possibly make. Don't lay down roots if you don't own your house. Buy don't rent, etc. ps, does anyone know the(an) average commute time for someone who is not able to afford a living place next to their employer in these areas?
  - pc86 11y ago
    The situation you describe doesn't sound like an injustice at all. They can't afford rent. It's one thing to make an argument about a retiree who owns their home in full but is forced to leave because they can't afford property taxes. It's something else entirely to say it's an injustice that someone can't continue living in someone else's house because it happens to be too expensive. And anyway, sometimes renting is cheaper than buying. It's not inherently bad and there are certainly circumstances where it makes sense to rent for decades at a time.
    - fixermark 11y ago
      Why is the situation you've described fundamentally different than the situation I've described? Individual on a fixed income that is too low to pay the cost of living in their home and must therefore move, because the fact that the local economy has improved (making things more expensive) doesn't imply their income improves to match it.

aetherson 11y ago

Nobody "has" to try living in Mountain View. It's not like commuting to Mountain View from Sunnyvale or Santa Clara or, hell, San Jose is some kind of unbearable hardship. Where does this right to live exactly where you want to end? I'm a fairly wealthy software developer who lives in San Francisco, but I can't afford a home in Monterey Heights. If it's rank injustice for someone poorer than me to not be able to afford my neighborhood (Outer Mission) and they have to move to Daly City, is it also rank injustice for me not to be able to live in a swankier neighborhood? What if I really just want that house over there? Can I do that? These are serious questions -- I genuinely don't know where this line is supposed to be drawn.

mbrock 11y ago
Resisting gentrification is not about the right to live "exactly where you want." Often it's about the ability to keep paying an increasing rent in an apartment where you've lived for many years. It's also about entire city cores becoming entirely reserved for wealthy people. That doesn't mean lower income people want to point at a house and say "gimme." Doesn't have anything to do with wanting to live somewhere "swanky." Often it's about neighborhoods transforming from "livable and affordable" to "swanky," which increases landlord profits and is very nice for wealthy people, but also destroys communities. Aside from that, there are the larger questions... like, how the whole gentrification process is tied up with income distribution... we software developers tend to be relatively wealthy, because of market forces, and this money becomes a powerful reason for landlords to keep increasing rents... etc etc...
- raldi 11y ago
  > It's also about entire city cores becoming entirely reserved for wealthy people. If that were true, rent control and Prop 13 would have means-testing, and leave seniority completely out of the equation. Because they do not, they're actually about benefitting the establishment (even if wealthy) at the expense of newcomers (even if poor).
  - mbrock 11y ago