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Tom Fuller is one of the best reporters at The New York Times. He covered the Arab Spring in North Africa. He covered the military junta in Myanmar, sneaking ov
by vonnik 10y ago
Tom Fuller is one of the best reporters at The New York Times. He covered the Arab Spring in North Africa. He covered the military junta in Myanmar, sneaking over the Thai border. His life work deserves a Pulitzer, and now we're lucky to have him in SF. I've worked with him directly, and he's the real deal and also a nice guy.
The big questions about San Francisco are: How does it manage to be so rich and so poor at the same time? What does it mean for a city to have one of the highest number of millionaires per capita among its inhabitants, and also a large and growing homeless population?
When you think about San Francisco, you think about tech and homelessness. It's a city that's the seat of a global industry trying to grapple with a regional problem. That is, both the tech and the homelessness are part of larger systems over which San Francisco has little control.
The city has more to offer the homeless than many other US cities: weather that won't kill you, laws that support free healthcare, a citizenry that, until recently at least, believed the problem should not be swept under the rug or erased like LA took care of Skid Row.
But the weird thing about SF is how the city is becoming more and more disjointed. It has become a city that attracts people from around the world with economic opportunity. The tech workers that form the middle and upper middle class here don't have much else in common besides the economic opportunity they sought. They didn't come to solve homelessness in SF, and we can't blame them for that. And the homeless themselves come from many other places in the US.
So tech workers and homeless come to a city, but many of them are not from here, and therefore don't identify as belonging to the same community, a community which under other historical conditions might have tried to care for itself and solve its own problems.
I'm aware of a few attempts in SF to address homelessness: Handup, LavaMae, etc. And they're great, but they aren't the norm for tech.
There's also something strange about tech as an industry, which shapes its impact on SF. Older industries like carmakers employed hundreds of thousands of people, and employed them locally (at least until NAFTA). That is, organizations devoted to the accumulation of capital were also the source of a lot of employment in the cities where they were based.
Tech is different. Google employs an order of magnitude less than that. And it is addressing a global market rather than a national or local one. The bits at the base of its business have no ties to SF. It's solving problems and offering services worldwide, and doesn't really have to think much about the state and fate of the local economy. Maybe that's just the weirdness of globalization.
- 11thEarlOfMar 10y agoIt seems the entire Bay Area is from someplace else, myself included. I landed at San Jose Airport from Illinois in 1989, just in time for the Loma Prieta earthquake. In 2010, 31% of the residents of Alameda county, home of Berkeley, Oakland and Fremont, were born in a different country. Another 3rd, like me, were American born outside the State of California. I'd wager that less than 10% of the residents of Alameda County were born in Alameda County (the remaining from some other part of California). I'm not sure how that stacks up to other parts of the US, but in Boise, for example, 7% of the population is foreign born [0]. [0]http://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/1608830 http://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/1608830
- k-mcgrady 10y ago>> "The big questions about San Francisco are: How does it manage to be so rich and so poor at the same time? What does it mean for a city to have one of the highest number of millionaires per capita among its inhabitants, and also a large and growing homeless population?" Isn't this the same for any major city? It doesn't seem like an SF only problem.
- icantdrive55 10y agoI don't think it's a San Francisco problem either. I don't see it going away. I have given up on debating it. I would like to see certain cities/counties in the United States open up areas where people can camp legally. If there's crime problems, law enforcement will help; not harass though. I know there's a lot of people who will fight it. I'm tired of hearing, "If you build it, they will come." I'm just asking for a few acres that people can put up a tent, and have access to a few out houses. Maybe a hand washing station? Maybe a few shower heads? I know, enough with the maybes. This is where it gets crazy. I sometimes think they put too many maybes in the debate, so people will just throw up their hands, and do nothing. For all practical purposes, it's illegial to live without money. We all can't be expected to move to Alaska, and live off the land. Those days are gone. I have know people who literally got ticked for sleeping in their vechicles. They were between rentals. I have known two men who died of pneumonia while living on their boats. No--it can't proven. I just knew the guys, and they died too early. They lived on their boats because they were not economically viable anymore. They didn't have understanding families. They didn't have connections. This is not the America, I was so proud, of growing up. (I won't be back to debate. These are not just my wishes. I have a friend who's been homeless for years. The police have harassed him to--someone I don't completely know anymore. He just wants a place to put a tent, and access to a toilet.)