8 ms·

Why is San Francisco trying to strangle its golden goose?

46 points by endswapper 10y ago

cft 10y ago
As Margaret Thatcher said:"Socialists would rather have the poor poorer provided the rich were less rich" https://youtu.be/pdR7WW3XR9c https://youtu.be/pdR7WW3XR9c
- Synaesthesia 10y ago
  Well under her and Reagan's policies the rich got richer and the poor poorer.
  - mattmcknight 10y ago
    Simply false. Income gains were across the board in the Reagan years. https://www.brookings.edu/research/income-growth-and-decline-under-recent-u-s-presidents-and-the-new-challenge-to-restore-broad-economic-prosperity/ https://www.brookings.edu/research/income-growth-and-decline...
    - Synaesthesia 10y ago
      They all gained but if you look at the actual numbers, the wealthy classes far more than the lower income classes who basically stagnated (we have to take inflation into account) https://aneconomicsense.org/2012/01/29/the-impact-of-reagan-good-for-the-rich-bad-for-most/ https://aneconomicsense.org/2012/01/29/the-impact-of-reagan-...
- osullivj 10y ago
  The Blessed Margaret also said "the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money"
- cowardlydragon 10y ago
  It's been shown that psychologically people don't care about how much absolute wealth / possessions they have. All they care about is their relative position.
  - prodigal_erik 10y ago
    Isn't that the hedonic treadmill? People don't really notice what they already have but resent what they don't. If I lost something important like indoor plumbing, I don't think I'd be comforted by knowing everyone else lost it too.
- aoiao 10y ago
  Horseshit summary of what goes on in SF.
- idlewords 10y ago
  Margaret Thatcher said a lot of things. This has no relevance to what is happening right now in San Francisco.
irq11 10y ago
You'd think that San Francisco didn't exist before tech came to town. The quickest and most effective way to fix a demand crisis is to eliminate the demand. And it has the nice side effect of diversifying the tech industry and reducing the ridiculousness of the tech echo chamber. San Francisco could do a lot worse than strangling this particular goose. Tech will find a way to go on.
jimmywanger 10y ago
San Francisco was a no-go zone in the 80s. Soma was mainly warehouses and unpaved lots, and the Mission was dangerous at nights. What are the "downsides of the technology boom"? The mission was originally german-irish, and then became latino. Now a lot of young technology professionals live there, cause, you know, cities evolve. I remember in the 80s you had to hopscotch over human feces when walking in SF. Why are politicians so short sighted that they want wealthy, well educated people out of their city?
- irq11 10y ago
  You still have to hopscotch over human feces. And now you have to hopscotch over the people who have been pushed out of their homes, too.
  - twblalock 10y ago
    The homeless in SF are almost all mentally ill, not working people who were displaced by high rents. In fact, a lot of them come to SF from elsewhere, where they were already homeless, because SF is simply more tolerant of homeless people than any other city in the area.
    - idlewords 10y ago
      The homeless in SF are not all mentally ill. They are people who are in precarious housing situations to begin with. A lot of the homelessness in SF is not visible. You see the ranting person in the street off their meds, but not the families who are in and out of shelters. https://sfgov.org/lhcb/sites/default/files/2015%20San%20Francisco%20Homeless%20Count%20%20Report_0.pdf https://sfgov.org/lhcb/sites/default/files/2015%20San%20Fran...
      - twblalock 10y ago
        The survey shows that the precariously housed people, which it defines as "chronically homeless", have significantly higher rates of drug and alcohol abuse than the general homeless population (pages 52 - 53). Obviously higher rents are making it harder to get out of homelessness (and the survey acknowledges that many times), but they are not the reason most of the chronic homeless ended up being homeless in the first place, by their own account: "Nearly one-third of chronically homeless respondents reported alcohol or substance abuse as the primary cause of their homelessness; this was in contrast to 14% among non-chronic respondents. Fewer chronically homeless respondents reported economic factors as the primary cause of their homelessness. For example, 19% reported job loss as a primary cause compared to 27% of non-chronic respondents." According to the survey (same pages), the chronically homeless are less likely to be in shelters and accept government assistance than the general homeless population. They therefore comprise a significant number of the homeless seen on the streets. Also, according to the survey, among the chronically homeless in San Francisco, there were only 18 families in 2015 (page 50).
justinlardinois 10y ago
> Detroit doesn’t place burdensome regulations on automobile manufacturers; Idaho doesn’t put undue restrictions and hurdles in front of potato farmers; and California takes steps to protect its farmers — because these industries are part of the lifeblood and identity of their respective states. Aside from Detroit not being a state, isn't this also because these industries are the main employers in their areas? Tech companies employ a small minority of the people that live in San Francisco.
wott 10y ago
I find this article very badly argued. > Detroit doesn’t place burdensome regulations on automobile manufacturers; Idaho doesn’t put undue restrictions and hurdles in front of potato farmers; and California takes steps to protect its farmers — because these industries are part of the lifeblood and identity of their respective states. And automobile industry became the doom of Detroit, and Californian style farming could pretty well become the doom of that state.
- twblalock 10y ago
  Farming is a small percentage of California's GDP -- less than 5%, if I remember correctly. California would be just fine without it.
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    Google says it may be as low as 2% in fact.
  - idlewords 10y ago
    Except for the vast swathes of the Central Valley that would be left destitute.
- jt2190 10y ago
  It's not an article. It's an editorial written by a lobbyist.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
kafkaesq 10y ago
Some of the proposed measures may be misguided; others seem rather tame. But either way, talk of "strangling the golden goose" (or implications that the entire industry will pack up and leave as a result of these measures) is just dumb hyperbole. On top of that, some of the author's logic is just... broken: It continues with the shutting down of private bus services for tech workers that reduce traffic and pollution and encourage residents to stay in the city. Almost none of the new tech workers were "residents" before the current boom. The problem with the shuttle busses is that they encourage people to move to the city -- forcing the people who were, in fact, long-term residents to move out. The fact that the author (obviously very sympathetic to the tech industry) can not just miss, but completely invert this obvious point simply underscores the disconnect -- or more direct terms, cluelessness -- among tech workers that some longer-term residents are so resentful of.
- jimmywanger 10y ago
  > forcing the people who were, in fact, long-term residents to move out. What's wrong with this? If you're a renter, you sort of accept the fact that you can be forced to move at any given time, or that rents may be hiked up. Rent control has been an unmitigated disaster in SF. You're basically giving a subsidy to people who have lived here for a long time, over new arrivals. Cities change over time. People arrive all the time. To try to shut people out is naive and short-sighted. I sure don't want to live in a time capsule.
  - kafkaesq 10y ago
    What's wrong with this? Heck, I don't know -- whole families being traumatized? Children having their lives upended, because their parents suddenly have to move across the state (or the country)? That sort of thing? So you can live within walking distance of that fancy new Belgian beer bar, and your favorite S&M club? It's one thing to acknowledge that displacement of existing (generally lowest income tier) residents is very unfortunate -- and yes, causes real suffering -- but to maintain that the cure (e.g. rent control) may be worse than disease. That's at least a position with a certain logic to it. But what people reasonably resent about the new tech elite is that (some of them) don't even pretend to rely on sober assessments like the above. They just come right and out say it: "What's wrong with poor people being displaced? What's wrong with a city that school teachers, first responders, restaurant workers can't afford to live in? I'm doing fine -- why should I give a fuck?"
kartan 10y ago
> Detroit doesn’t place burdensome regulations on automobile manufacturers I think that San Francisco is trying to avert the Detroit outcome. Instead of being completely dependent on a single industry they are trying to regulate the growth and allow non-techies to live there. And instead of just forbidding things or over-regulate they are using taxes and other incentives to bring balance to the city. The article just cites some regulations as evil-doers without explaining why that's the case, or what is the relationship between the selected regulations. I really hope that San Francisco is able to keep its roots and what make it a great city to innovate and live. > Eric Mar, a member of the city’s Board of Supervisors, even went so far as to say that the tax would serve as indemnification for the “downside of the technology boom,” according to The New York Times. And as clarification, according to The New York Times Eric said that the tax would serve as indemnification for the “downside of the technology boom”. The "even went so far" is just part of Techcruch opinion.
- jimmywanger 10y ago
  > I really hope that San Francisco is able to keep its roots and what make it a great city to innovate and live. What roots are these? The Irish used to run the avenues, and now the Sunset is predominantly Chinese. Like I mentioned before, the Mission used to be german-irish, then it turned latino, and now there are a lot of techies there. Portola used to have mostly white and black residents, now there are a lot of Chinese people there. Change happens. You have to constantly re-invent yourself.
  - idlewords 10y ago
    Techies are not an ethnic group. No one goes to SOMA to try the delicious techie food. The issue is an economically diverse city becoming polarized into a theme park and bedroom community for high earners, and a bunch of poor enclaves, with a service sector that has to commute in from outside the city.
    - jimmywanger 10y ago
      > Techies are not an ethnic group. No one goes to SOMA to try the delicious techie food. They sure as heck try to go to SOMA to recruit technical people and try to get technical advice. How is that any less of a tribe than a specific ethnicity. One tribe has spaghetti, one has dim sum, and the other has layers upon layers of technical expertise. > The issue is an economically diverse city becoming polarized into a theme park and bedroom community for high earners, and a bunch of poor enclaves, with a service sector that has to commute in from outside the city. Define economically diverse. The only reason less affluent people can't live in the city is because of the NIMBYism of SF residents, and the fact that they believe real estate should be a good financial investment. A few decades of compound interest later, you get to where we're at, where either you have to be incredibly wealthy or lived here for a long time to afford anything.
venomsnake 10y ago
Is innovation leader the new newspeak for "job creators". The abundance of tech jobs gives SF a mild to serious case of the resource curse. You can have too much of a good thing. When all the money from high paying jobs is absorbed by the rent - they are not doing anything useful. IF tech jobs move away - the city landlords will lose. Not so much the city itself.
- rhizome 10y ago
  Indeed, after the first dotcom crash I knew people who were able to negotiate rent reductions and this was otherwise not an uncommon story to hear at parties.
leroy_masochist 10y ago
As a NY-based entrepreneur, from my perspective the only people who lose here are those who have convinced themselves that there is no place other to be than San Francisco, and who accordingly suffer to a greater and greater degree as their commitment to staying in the city becomes less and less economically justifiable. Otherwise...we're all grownups here. If the people of San Francisco decide that the best possible set of tradeoffs involves reducing tech's footprint, and their elected representatives implement policies to that effect, then that's democracy. Certainly the city's rich and diverse history provides some weight to the anti-tech crowd's strongly held belief that the City needs to pump the brakes.
- twblalock 10y ago
  > As a NY-based entrepreneur, from my perspective the only people who lose here are those who have convinced themselves that there is no place other to be than San Francisco, and who accordingly suffer to a greater and greater degree as their commitment to staying in the city becomes less and less economically justifiable. I think it's pretty similar to New Yorkers who insist on living in Manhattan, rather than the other boroughs which are more affordable, or, God forbid, New Jersey. You don't have to move very far from San Francisco to get a significant decrease in rent. Just a few miles is enough. I know plenty of people who insist on living in SF. They do the same things after work that most people do: go home, eat, watch TV or read a book. They go out a few nights per week. They could easily move 10 miles south, cut their rent by more than 1/3, and still spend just as much time enjoying the San Francisco restaurants and nightlife as they do now.
fatbird 10y ago
"Hundreds of high-paying jobs and millions in tax revenue" ... is trivial in the scheme of San Francisco things, which has a population of 800,000+ and an annual general fund revenue of 2.7 billion.
- idlewords 10y ago
  The general fund figure for 2016 is over 4 billion. 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_...
orthoganol 10y ago
Probably because San Francisco had a strong reputation for things not related to tech, and then tech arrived. Silicon Valley being SF is relatively new.
idlewords 10y ago
I find the part about "trying to shoehorn ride-sharing entrepreneurs into “employee” status" particularly rich. Anyone who takes Uber in SF has met a fair number of these 'entrepreneurs'. They look an awful lot like low-wage employees trying to make ends meet, and extending them basic protections that reflect the reality of their job is not clipping their entrepreneurial wings.
- boundring 10y ago
  Bin-go... It's pretty sad that many other companies and jobs with "independent contractor" status but continually exploitative conditions have slipped under the radar. Newspaper carriers are a particularly good example. Typically 100 miles or more, seven days a week, with the cost of each paper deducted from their pay. I tried a paper route last year. It's a 60-70hr/week job without overtime pay. Pays less than minimum wage after factoring in vehicular expenses. Excuse me for dumping, I just had to laugh when quitting the job meant a contractual month's-advance notice or a $3,000 fine.
- flyinglizard 10y ago
  It's not really fair to frame them as employees. Their relationship with Uber is a two way street - they can work whenever they want and can drive for another service in parallel. They don't have a boss in the traditional sense, but rather they are providing services to Uber. Denying that places the entire concept of the "gig economy" at risk, and it's a shame because this mutual flexibility is the only way forward in many fields, for both the companies and individuals.
  - idlewords 10y ago
    The gig economy is a way to minimize labor costs. Uber drivers can "drive for another service in parallel", but Uber is devoting all of its resources right now to destroying those rivals.
    - flyinglizard 10y ago
      It's one way to look at it. The other way to look at it is that the gig economy allows the creation of services that were previously unthinkable. I also find it ironic that Uber drivers are discussed from a point of exploited labor, while AirBNB renters are treated like greedy landlords - both services being very much alike: a way for individuals to provide services with their underutilized resources (time, vehicles, apartments).
aoiao 10y ago
SF's cultural capital is ebbing away. Money is not people. Copious tech wealth is not saving anyone's life and it certainly isn't adding any flavor. The city was fine before computers. Wealth is setting up a home for wealth in SF. A city should be comprised of people, not just expensive new buildings. Kill yourselves.
- dang 10y ago
  > Kill yourselves. You can't comment like this here, and since several of your other comments have also broken the site guidelines, we've banned this account. If you don't want it to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and promise to abide by the guidelines in the future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
lagadu 10y ago
Easy answer to the clickbaity title: because the well-being of a city's residents takes priority over corporate interests. The bit about forcing ride-sharing providers to actually treat who effectively is their employee like, you know, an employee is particularly rich. The whole article just reads like an ode to corporatism; a whiny one too.
matt4077 10y ago
This is eerily close to the old joke of how economists "know the price of everything and the value of nothing". For this author, the purpose of SF's regulations seem to be in the realm ok the "unknown unknown". He doesn't even acknowledge the possibility of defining quality of life by anything other than GDP.
jedberg 10y ago
You don't have to go to Boulder or SLC -- San Jose offers a lot of incentives for tech companies. In fact San Jose doesn't tax you on income at all (there is a per employee tax of $18 a year up to 25K but that's it). And if you're a big enough tech company, you can get that waived too.
- JBlue42 10y ago
  Isn't San Jose's tax policies part of the issues it's having in maintaining its city?
luka-birsa 10y ago
So what the author is trying to tell me is: let's look the other way because it's making us money. It doesn't matter if people or communities get hurt in the process, we're making money, so let's make sure our unethical golden goose keeps making money. I'm a business owner working in tech an I actually applaud SF for having the guts to stand up for its people.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
mwfunk 10y ago
I think the fundamental misunderstanding expressed in this article is this: San Francisco isn't the tech capital of the world, San Francisco is an hour up 101 from the tech capital of the world. It has a tremendous startup scene because of its proximity to SV, but some SF residents (rightly or wrongly) would prefer it didn't become SV2, which it has been slowly turning into (WRT startups at least). SF's standing in the tech industry is 100% based on geography, there is nothing inherently tech-friendly about SF itself. Now, one could argue about whether it would be good or bad for SF to turn into SV2, but unless someone starts bulldozing entire city blocks to start building campuses for companies with hundreds or thousands of employees, it is not yet SV2. To date the conflicts have been more about how much runoff from SV are SF residents willing to tolerate, in terms of being a bedroom community for SV, and the local startup scene that arises from that arrangement. I personally think that much of the anti-tech sentiment in SF comes from entitlement, tribalism, and a culture that values protest and political strife for its own sake over actually trying to understand what the problems are and actually trying to solve them, but that's just my take. More charitably, I see it as SF trying to figure itself out in changing times, as opposed to the "tech capital of the world" being strangely oblivious to its own place in the industry.
- idlewords 10y ago
  A lot of the tension between SF and SV comes from that region's refusal to accept its status as an employment hub. Communities like Palo Alto want to preserve the fiction that they are spacious suburbs, and use zoning laws to enforce the fiction. Silicon Valley is really exporting its housing dysfunction to San Francisco, which adds its own.
  - mwfunk 10y ago
    Everyone I know who lives in SF and works in SV (and I've known a lot of them) lives in SF because they want to, not because it was the best choice economically. They want to live in SF because of the culture or the nightlife, and are willing to endure sitting on a bus for 3 hours a day and paying way more to get way less in order to live there. For all of those people, if all they cared about was finding housing, it would have been way more practical to just get a place in Sunnyvale or Santa Clara or San Jose (or Morgan Hill, for that matter, although that's getting back into painful commute territory). Now, one might say, "but it's so much more boring to live in Sunnyvale than SF!", but that's still a choice being made for lifestyle reasons and not a housing decision that they were forced into. I would also say that if anyone is bored almost anywhere in this day and age, that that's far more a personal failing than a property of where they live, but that's totally besides the point. :)
ddebernardy 10y ago
Carl Szabo, senior counsel working for NetChoice, a DC lobby, talking the book of those who pay him in a Techcrunch opinion piece...
ajamesm 10y ago
> When companies such as Twitter, Airbnb, Zynga dying, unprofitable, dead
macavity23 10y ago
Written by Carl Szabo from 'Net Choice', a Trade Association whose members include Google, AOL, Facebook, Ebay. This is a straight-up corporate press release.

46 points by endswapper 10y ago

cft 10y ago

As Margaret Thatcher said:"Socialists would rather have the poor poorer provided the rich were less rich" https://youtu.be/pdR7WW3XR9c https://youtu.be/pdR7WW3XR9c

Synaesthesia 10y ago
Well under her and Reagan's policies the rich got richer and the poor poorer.
- mattmcknight 10y ago
  Simply false. Income gains were across the board in the Reagan years. https://www.brookings.edu/research/income-growth-and-decline-under-recent-u-s-presidents-and-the-new-challenge-to-restore-broad-economic-prosperity/ https://www.brookings.edu/research/income-growth-and-decline...
  - Synaesthesia 10y ago
    They all gained but if you look at the actual numbers, the wealthy classes far more than the lower income classes who basically stagnated (we have to take inflation into account) https://aneconomicsense.org/2012/01/29/the-impact-of-reagan-good-for-the-rich-bad-for-most/ https://aneconomicsense.org/2012/01/29/the-impact-of-reagan-...
osullivj 10y ago
The Blessed Margaret also said "the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money"
cowardlydragon 10y ago
It's been shown that psychologically people don't care about how much absolute wealth / possessions they have. All they care about is their relative position.
- prodigal_erik 10y ago
  Isn't that the hedonic treadmill? People don't really notice what they already have but resent what they don't. If I lost something important like indoor plumbing, I don't think I'd be comforted by knowing everyone else lost it too.
aoiao 10y ago
Horseshit summary of what goes on in SF.
idlewords 10y ago
Margaret Thatcher said a lot of things. This has no relevance to what is happening right now in San Francisco.

irq11 10y ago

You'd think that San Francisco didn't exist before tech came to town. The quickest and most effective way to fix a demand crisis is to eliminate the demand. And it has the nice side effect of diversifying the tech industry and reducing the ridiculousness of the tech echo chamber. San Francisco could do a lot worse than strangling this particular goose. Tech will find a way to go on.

jimmywanger 10y ago

San Francisco was a no-go zone in the 80s. Soma was mainly warehouses and unpaved lots, and the Mission was dangerous at nights. What are the "downsides of the technology boom"? The mission was originally german-irish, and then became latino. Now a lot of young technology professionals live there, cause, you know, cities evolve. I remember in the 80s you had to hopscotch over human feces when walking in SF. Why are politicians so short sighted that they want wealthy, well educated people out of their city?

irq11 10y ago
You still have to hopscotch over human feces. And now you have to hopscotch over the people who have been pushed out of their homes, too.
- twblalock 10y ago
  The homeless in SF are almost all mentally ill, not working people who were displaced by high rents. In fact, a lot of them come to SF from elsewhere, where they were already homeless, because SF is simply more tolerant of homeless people than any other city in the area.
  - idlewords 10y ago
    The homeless in SF are not all mentally ill. They are people who are in precarious housing situations to begin with. A lot of the homelessness in SF is not visible. You see the ranting person in the street off their meds, but not the families who are in and out of shelters. https://sfgov.org/lhcb/sites/default/files/2015%20San%20Francisco%20Homeless%20Count%20%20Report_0.pdf https://sfgov.org/lhcb/sites/default/files/2015%20San%20Fran...
    - twblalock 10y ago
      The survey shows that the precariously housed people, which it defines as "chronically homeless", have significantly higher rates of drug and alcohol abuse than the general homeless population (pages 52 - 53). Obviously higher rents are making it harder to get out of homelessness (and the survey acknowledges that many times), but they are not the reason most of the chronic homeless ended up being homeless in the first place, by their own account: "Nearly one-third of chronically homeless respondents reported alcohol or substance abuse as the primary cause of their homelessness; this was in contrast to 14% among non-chronic respondents. Fewer chronically homeless respondents reported economic factors as the primary cause of their homelessness. For example, 19% reported job loss as a primary cause compared to 27% of non-chronic respondents." According to the survey (same pages), the chronically homeless are less likely to be in shelters and accept government assistance than the general homeless population. They therefore comprise a significant number of the homeless seen on the streets. Also, according to the survey, among the chronically homeless in San Francisco, there were only 18 families in 2015 (page 50).

justinlardinois 10y ago

> Detroit doesn’t place burdensome regulations on automobile manufacturers; Idaho doesn’t put undue restrictions and hurdles in front of potato farmers; and California takes steps to protect its farmers — because these industries are part of the lifeblood and identity of their respective states. Aside from Detroit not being a state, isn't this also because these industries are the main employers in their areas? Tech companies employ a small minority of the people that live in San Francisco.

wott 10y ago

I find this article very badly argued. > Detroit doesn’t place burdensome regulations on automobile manufacturers; Idaho doesn’t put undue restrictions and hurdles in front of potato farmers; and California takes steps to protect its farmers — because these industries are part of the lifeblood and identity of their respective states. And automobile industry became the doom of Detroit, and Californian style farming could pretty well become the doom of that state.

twblalock 10y ago
Farming is a small percentage of California's GDP -- less than 5%, if I remember correctly. California would be just fine without it.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  Google says it may be as low as 2% in fact.
- idlewords 10y ago
  Except for the vast swathes of the Central Valley that would be left destitute.
jt2190 10y ago
It's not an article. It's an editorial written by a lobbyist.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

kafkaesq 10y ago

Some of the proposed measures may be misguided; others seem rather tame. But either way, talk of "strangling the golden goose" (or implications that the entire industry will pack up and leave as a result of these measures) is just dumb hyperbole. On top of that, some of the author's logic is just... broken: It continues with the shutting down of private bus services for tech workers that reduce traffic and pollution and encourage residents to stay in the city. Almost none of the new tech workers were "residents" before the current boom. The problem with the shuttle busses is that they encourage people to move to the city -- forcing the people who were, in fact, long-term residents to move out. The fact that the author (obviously very sympathetic to the tech industry) can not just miss, but completely invert this obvious point simply underscores the disconnect -- or more direct terms, cluelessness -- among tech workers that some longer-term residents are so resentful of.

jimmywanger 10y ago
> forcing the people who were, in fact, long-term residents to move out. What's wrong with this? If you're a renter, you sort of accept the fact that you can be forced to move at any given time, or that rents may be hiked up. Rent control has been an unmitigated disaster in SF. You're basically giving a subsidy to people who have lived here for a long time, over new arrivals. Cities change over time. People arrive all the time. To try to shut people out is naive and short-sighted. I sure don't want to live in a time capsule.
- kafkaesq 10y ago
  What's wrong with this? Heck, I don't know -- whole families being traumatized? Children having their lives upended, because their parents suddenly have to move across the state (or the country)? That sort of thing? So you can live within walking distance of that fancy new Belgian beer bar, and your favorite S&M club? It's one thing to acknowledge that displacement of existing (generally lowest income tier) residents is very unfortunate -- and yes, causes real suffering -- but to maintain that the cure (e.g. rent control) may be worse than disease. That's at least a position with a certain logic to it. But what people reasonably resent about the new tech elite is that (some of them) don't even pretend to rely on sober assessments like the above. They just come right and out say it: "What's wrong with poor people being displaced? What's wrong with a city that school teachers, first responders, restaurant workers can't afford to live in? I'm doing fine -- why should I give a fuck?"

kartan 10y ago

> Detroit doesn’t place burdensome regulations on automobile manufacturers I think that San Francisco is trying to avert the Detroit outcome. Instead of being completely dependent on a single industry they are trying to regulate the growth and allow non-techies to live there. And instead of just forbidding things or over-regulate they are using taxes and other incentives to bring balance to the city. The article just cites some regulations as evil-doers without explaining why that's the case, or what is the relationship between the selected regulations. I really hope that San Francisco is able to keep its roots and what make it a great city to innovate and live. > Eric Mar, a member of the city’s Board of Supervisors, even went so far as to say that the tax would serve as indemnification for the “downside of the technology boom,” according to The New York Times. And as clarification, according to The New York Times Eric said that the tax would serve as indemnification for the “downside of the technology boom”. The "even went so far" is just part of Techcruch opinion.

jimmywanger 10y ago
> I really hope that San Francisco is able to keep its roots and what make it a great city to innovate and live. What roots are these? The Irish used to run the avenues, and now the Sunset is predominantly Chinese. Like I mentioned before, the Mission used to be german-irish, then it turned latino, and now there are a lot of techies there. Portola used to have mostly white and black residents, now there are a lot of Chinese people there. Change happens. You have to constantly re-invent yourself.
- idlewords 10y ago
  Techies are not an ethnic group. No one goes to SOMA to try the delicious techie food. The issue is an economically diverse city becoming polarized into a theme park and bedroom community for high earners, and a bunch of poor enclaves, with a service sector that has to commute in from outside the city.
  - jimmywanger 10y ago
    > Techies are not an ethnic group. No one goes to SOMA to try the delicious techie food. They sure as heck try to go to SOMA to recruit technical people and try to get technical advice. How is that any less of a tribe than a specific ethnicity. One tribe has spaghetti, one has dim sum, and the other has layers upon layers of technical expertise. > The issue is an economically diverse city becoming polarized into a theme park and bedroom community for high earners, and a bunch of poor enclaves, with a service sector that has to commute in from outside the city. Define economically diverse. The only reason less affluent people can't live in the city is because of the NIMBYism of SF residents, and the fact that they believe real estate should be a good financial investment. A few decades of compound interest later, you get to where we're at, where either you have to be incredibly wealthy or lived here for a long time to afford anything.

venomsnake 10y ago

Is innovation leader the new newspeak for "job creators". The abundance of tech jobs gives SF a mild to serious case of the resource curse. You can have too much of a good thing. When all the money from high paying jobs is absorbed by the rent - they are not doing anything useful. IF tech jobs move away - the city landlords will lose. Not so much the city itself.

rhizome 10y ago
Indeed, after the first dotcom crash I knew people who were able to negotiate rent reductions and this was otherwise not an uncommon story to hear at parties.

leroy_masochist 10y ago

As a NY-based entrepreneur, from my perspective the only people who lose here are those who have convinced themselves that there is no place other to be than San Francisco, and who accordingly suffer to a greater and greater degree as their commitment to staying in the city becomes less and less economically justifiable. Otherwise...we're all grownups here. If the people of San Francisco decide that the best possible set of tradeoffs involves reducing tech's footprint, and their elected representatives implement policies to that effect, then that's democracy. Certainly the city's rich and diverse history provides some weight to the anti-tech crowd's strongly held belief that the City needs to pump the brakes.

twblalock 10y ago
> As a NY-based entrepreneur, from my perspective the only people who lose here are those who have convinced themselves that there is no place other to be than San Francisco, and who accordingly suffer to a greater and greater degree as their commitment to staying in the city becomes less and less economically justifiable. I think it's pretty similar to New Yorkers who insist on living in Manhattan, rather than the other boroughs which are more affordable, or, God forbid, New Jersey. You don't have to move very far from San Francisco to get a significant decrease in rent. Just a few miles is enough. I know plenty of people who insist on living in SF. They do the same things after work that most people do: go home, eat, watch TV or read a book. They go out a few nights per week. They could easily move 10 miles south, cut their rent by more than 1/3, and still spend just as much time enjoying the San Francisco restaurants and nightlife as they do now.

fatbird 10y ago

"Hundreds of high-paying jobs and millions in tax revenue" ... is trivial in the scheme of San Francisco things, which has a population of 800,000+ and an annual general fund revenue of 2.7 billion.

idlewords 10y ago
The general fund figure for 2016 is over 4 billion. 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_...

orthoganol 10y ago

Probably because San Francisco had a strong reputation for things not related to tech, and then tech arrived. Silicon Valley being SF is relatively new.

idlewords 10y ago

I find the part about "trying to shoehorn ride-sharing entrepreneurs into “employee” status" particularly rich. Anyone who takes Uber in SF has met a fair number of these 'entrepreneurs'. They look an awful lot like low-wage employees trying to make ends meet, and extending them basic protections that reflect the reality of their job is not clipping their entrepreneurial wings.

boundring 10y ago
Bin-go... It's pretty sad that many other companies and jobs with "independent contractor" status but continually exploitative conditions have slipped under the radar. Newspaper carriers are a particularly good example. Typically 100 miles or more, seven days a week, with the cost of each paper deducted from their pay. I tried a paper route last year. It's a 60-70hr/week job without overtime pay. Pays less than minimum wage after factoring in vehicular expenses. Excuse me for dumping, I just had to laugh when quitting the job meant a contractual month's-advance notice or a $3,000 fine.
flyinglizard 10y ago
It's not really fair to frame them as employees. Their relationship with Uber is a two way street - they can work whenever they want and can drive for another service in parallel. They don't have a boss in the traditional sense, but rather they are providing services to Uber. Denying that places the entire concept of the "gig economy" at risk, and it's a shame because this mutual flexibility is the only way forward in many fields, for both the companies and individuals.
- idlewords 10y ago
  The gig economy is a way to minimize labor costs. Uber drivers can "drive for another service in parallel", but Uber is devoting all of its resources right now to destroying those rivals.
  - flyinglizard 10y ago
    It's one way to look at it. The other way to look at it is that the gig economy allows the creation of services that were previously unthinkable. I also find it ironic that Uber drivers are discussed from a point of exploited labor, while AirBNB renters are treated like greedy landlords - both services being very much alike: a way for individuals to provide services with their underutilized resources (time, vehicles, apartments).

aoiao 10y ago

SF's cultural capital is ebbing away. Money is not people. Copious tech wealth is not saving anyone's life and it certainly isn't adding any flavor. The city was fine before computers. Wealth is setting up a home for wealth in SF. A city should be comprised of people, not just expensive new buildings. Kill yourselves.

dang 10y ago
> Kill yourselves. You can't comment like this here, and since several of your other comments have also broken the site guidelines, we've banned this account. If you don't want it to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and promise to abide by the guidelines in the future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

lagadu 10y ago

Easy answer to the clickbaity title: because the well-being of a city's residents takes priority over corporate interests. The bit about forcing ride-sharing providers to actually treat who effectively is their employee like, you know, an employee is particularly rich. The whole article just reads like an ode to corporatism; a whiny one too.

matt4077 10y ago

This is eerily close to the old joke of how economists "know the price of everything and the value of nothing". For this author, the purpose of SF's regulations seem to be in the realm ok the "unknown unknown". He doesn't even acknowledge the possibility of defining quality of life by anything other than GDP.

jedberg 10y ago

You don't have to go to Boulder or SLC -- San Jose offers a lot of incentives for tech companies. In fact San Jose doesn't tax you on income at all (there is a per employee tax of $18 a year up to 25K but that's it). And if you're a big enough tech company, you can get that waived too.

JBlue42 10y ago
Isn't San Jose's tax policies part of the issues it's having in maintaining its city?

luka-birsa 10y ago

So what the author is trying to tell me is: let's look the other way because it's making us money. It doesn't matter if people or communities get hurt in the process, we're making money, so let's make sure our unethical golden goose keeps making money. I'm a business owner working in tech an I actually applaud SF for having the guts to stand up for its people.

deleted 10y ago

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mwfunk 10y ago

I think the fundamental misunderstanding expressed in this article is this: San Francisco isn't the tech capital of the world, San Francisco is an hour up 101 from the tech capital of the world. It has a tremendous startup scene because of its proximity to SV, but some SF residents (rightly or wrongly) would prefer it didn't become SV2, which it has been slowly turning into (WRT startups at least). SF's standing in the tech industry is 100% based on geography, there is nothing inherently tech-friendly about SF itself. Now, one could argue about whether it would be good or bad for SF to turn into SV2, but unless someone starts bulldozing entire city blocks to start building campuses for companies with hundreds or thousands of employees, it is not yet SV2. To date the conflicts have been more about how much runoff from SV are SF residents willing to tolerate, in terms of being a bedroom community for SV, and the local startup scene that arises from that arrangement. I personally think that much of the anti-tech sentiment in SF comes from entitlement, tribalism, and a culture that values protest and political strife for its own sake over actually trying to understand what the problems are and actually trying to solve them, but that's just my take. More charitably, I see it as SF trying to figure itself out in changing times, as opposed to the "tech capital of the world" being strangely oblivious to its own place in the industry.

idlewords 10y ago
A lot of the tension between SF and SV comes from that region's refusal to accept its status as an employment hub. Communities like Palo Alto want to preserve the fiction that they are spacious suburbs, and use zoning laws to enforce the fiction. Silicon Valley is really exporting its housing dysfunction to San Francisco, which adds its own.
- mwfunk 10y ago
  Everyone I know who lives in SF and works in SV (and I've known a lot of them) lives in SF because they want to, not because it was the best choice economically. They want to live in SF because of the culture or the nightlife, and are willing to endure sitting on a bus for 3 hours a day and paying way more to get way less in order to live there. For all of those people, if all they cared about was finding housing, it would have been way more practical to just get a place in Sunnyvale or Santa Clara or San Jose (or Morgan Hill, for that matter, although that's getting back into painful commute territory). Now, one might say, "but it's so much more boring to live in Sunnyvale than SF!", but that's still a choice being made for lifestyle reasons and not a housing decision that they were forced into. I would also say that if anyone is bored almost anywhere in this day and age, that that's far more a personal failing than a property of where they live, but that's totally besides the point. :)

ddebernardy 10y ago

Carl Szabo, senior counsel working for NetChoice, a DC lobby, talking the book of those who pay him in a Techcrunch opinion piece...

ajamesm 10y ago

> When companies such as Twitter, Airbnb, Zynga dying, unprofitable, dead

macavity23 10y ago

Written by Carl Szabo from 'Net Choice', a Trade Association whose members include Google, AOL, Facebook, Ebay. This is a straight-up corporate press release.