10 ms·

Having lived in SF for a number of years now, I 100% agree that SF is just dystopian as hell. Trash everywhere downtown, human feces/needles/smell of urine all

Having lived in SF for a number of years now, I 100% agree that SF is just dystopian as hell. Trash everywhere downtown, human feces/needles/smell of urine all over downtown & SOMA, depressing mix of aggressive and zombie-like homeless, very few kids/families, very few minorities (especially African-Americans), barely functioning public transportation system, high rents forcing six-figure earners to live with 2 roommates and still pay $2500/month, 400 sq ft studios going for $700k, every other non-tech worker is an Uber driver/Instacart Shopper/DoorDash delivery person

prolikewhoa 8y ago
Seattle too!
- Aloha 8y ago
  Seattle is at least marginally cheaper
  - dawhizkid 8y ago
    Even though Seattle has gotten more expensive, it still pales in comparison to SF...plus no state income tax.
    - Aloha 8y ago
      My rent has still effectively more than doubled since 2014
- davidw 8y ago
  Seattle has been building enough that apparently it has started to curb prices. Supply and demand are real. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-rents-growing-at-among-slowest-rates-in-country-as-apartment-boom-reaches-record/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-re...
atom-morgan 8y ago
How is it that so much aggressive political rhetoric related to race and the tech industry is coming from this area if there are very few African Americans there in the first place? I live in Atlanta where the minority population is much higher all around and I don't get the sense at all that there's rampant racism or discrimination. Is this problem unique to the Bay Area or is this largely white guilt?
- dawhizkid 8y ago
  SF used to having a thriving black population. It has declined for decades due to exclusionary housing policies that have forced low/middle income earners out of the city, which disproportionately affects minorities. But to you question, diversity in tech has little to do with the ethnic makeup of the Bay Area. This is a transient town...people come here to work from all over and it's a completely separate issue.
  - scarmig 8y ago
    That leaves out quite a lot. Back in the mid-20th century, the Fillmore was a thriving black community, with around 50k black residents in a relatively central part of the city. The city, however, considered it "blighted." Too many homeless people, too much drug use, too much property and violent crime. And so the SF Redevelopment Agency decided to knock down a bunch of blighted Victorians, relocate the black population, and replace the Victorians with modern apartment buildings. That was the beginning of the end of African American SF. Obviously some relocated to other areas of the city, but just as many left for other pastures. Housing policies since then have hardly helped the situation, but YIMBY types need to understand the history of redevelopment both so they don't make the same mistakes and so they have empathy for when poor folks in a community are skeptical of their promised land.
  - tmh79 8y ago
    "This is a transient town...people come here to work from all over and it's a completely separate issue" While true, this elides over a pretty large issue with minorities in tech. In general, the "transient after college" phase, where high potential students move to high potential areas is a privileged position that most people aren't able to participate in for many reasons. Maybe its because your parents (or brothers/sisters/nieces/nephews etc) are struggling and you need to take care of them day today, maybe its because you already have student loans up to the hilt and feel that living at home is a less risky proposition than moving across the country to a place where rent is going to be 2x the size of any paycheck you've ever received, maybe its because you feel the community you come from needs you more than you need a tesla. In general, the types of people who have these types of issues that drive them not to migrate are going to be high performing, but lower wealth, and thus on balance more likely to be non-white all else being equal. IMO, a great way to help make "tech" a more diverse industry would be to open offices in Atlanta, a city with a large black population, and a very good university.
typon 8y ago
The utopia created by hackers on this very site
- minikites 8y ago
  Every action is political and ignoring that reality is how many of these problems are created in the first place. This is why many tech workers "hate politics", they hate having to be responsible for their actions.
  - xenihn 8y ago
    The vast majority of people hate having to be responsible for their actions, no need to single anyone out.
  - KirinDave 8y ago
    Most Americans "hate politics" because they've been socialized to, not because they actually do. "Bureaucracy is bad," is an idea deeply seated in the American psyche. It's true though, if more of us went to local government sessions, we could probably just utterly dominate the discourse and reject a lot of NIMBYisms outright, and that'd probably result in a lot of political changes. I myself regret bitterly how much I let my parent's culture influence my opinions on this, and it's only as I get older that I fully appreciate the many toxic and counter-productive ways my fundamental christian socialization has influenced me even as I've struggled to move more left throughout the course of my life.
  - TACIXAT 8y ago
    That's a weird assumption. I hate politics due to the influence of money, first past the post voting, and gerrymandering.
  - monetus 8y ago
    I have two definitions of politics, to help me think about this. The traditional and perjorative "theater meant to influence a goal" definition, as well as the "earnest, often unconscious, dynamics of a relationship." It is easy to want to avoid the first, but the second is ubiquitous unless you are a self-sufficient hermit.
Communitivity 8y ago
I could so see a planet-bound version of the movie Elysium. The elite top 5% live in walled off fortresses, a la Aeon Flux's city, and have everything - while the rest live outside in a daily fight to live against a dystopian environment financially and economically. I don't think it's inevitable though, so the question is - how do we stop it? We have some of the brighter minds in tech on this forum, what are your thoughts?
- atom-morgan 8y ago
  Since you mention Elysium, you might find this Twitter thread interesting: https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/1002231716453363712 https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/10022317164533637...
- ihm 8y ago
  Walking around Pacific Heights gives me that feeling… How to stop it and create a city where anyone can live: - build world class public transit - double the number of houses but decommodify the housing market as much as possible with lots of social housing and controlled rent increases
  - bilbo0s 8y ago
    I don't know man? I'm not too sanguine about the possibility of either of those things happening in the United States. Public transit has always kind of gone nowhere in this nation outside of the great coastal cities and Chicago. And as for the housing proposal, I can already hear the howls of "SOCIALISM!!!" that will be raised by certain very powerful interests and political parties.
    - true_religion 8y ago
      Cali is a progressive state. Is socialism really that feared there?
  - asdf21 8y ago
    >How to stop it and create a city where anyone can live I'd say if "building a city where anyone can live" is the highest goal, that's an issue in and of itself. Would you want to work for a company "where anyone could work?"
asveikau 8y ago
> very few kids/families, I am raising my kids here and disagree with your assessment. There is a pretty good community of families here.
- diab0lic 8y ago
  That's all well and good that you disagree, but SF has 13.4% persons under 18 compared to the national average of 22.6% [0]. There are very few kids / families. [0] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/sanfranciscocitycalifornia,US/PST045217 https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/sanfranciscocit...
  - francisofascii 8y ago
    I wonder if there are specific neighborhoods with families closer to the national average?
  - asveikau 8y ago
    You say something mathematically precise and then switch into a vague "very few". Take some walks around the parks and go people watching, you will get a better feel for what that "very few" can mean. 13% of 800,000 is about 100,000. Very few.
    - diab0lic 8y ago
      I was restating the line you quoted, and yes precisely SF has very few families compared to other cities in the US. A sister comment seems to indicate that even NYC is 24% (I haven't verified this.) So even for similar urbanization levels SF has very few families.
      - asveikau 8y ago
        Go look around. There are a lot of kids. My point isn't about in comparison to other cities, it is more, does a smaller rate really mean "few" and how much of a problem is it really. It's not the problem that the most negative naysayers will claim. Note I didn't say something like "affordability poses no problems for families". Because it does. But there is indeed a vibrant community.
closeparen 8y ago
Not to dismiss this completely, but there are neighborhoods with lots of kids around. SOMA just isn’t one of them.
- dawhizkid 8y ago
  SF has one of the lowest % of kids of any major US city. https://www.sfgate.com/mommyfiles/article/Many-families-leave-San-Francisco-but-what-about-10887001.php https://www.sfgate.com/mommyfiles/article/Many-families-leav...
  - closeparen 8y ago
    I should rephrase: there are definitely neighborhoods with lots of babies and toddlers. School aged children are a rare sight.
  - KirinDave 8y ago
    What's curious: this stat actually fails to represent quite how many parents from more normal surroudning communities bring their kids into SF because of the co-op school opportunities there. SF has done a lot of work to make co-op schools work, so lots of people with kids under 9 (myself included) find outright superior education options by bringing our kids into SF. It does involve putting parent hours towards the school, but many people with young kids are already geared for less raw hours towards work (either through superior economic resources or local support; everyone who can't hack it relies purely on the public systems).
KirinDave 8y ago
So let's build more facilities to help deal with the homeless problem rather than whining about why we can't just ship them off to an even bigger city, the way the rest of the western US does? We cannot stop other cities from doing this to us. So we are going to have to stop whining and cope.
nipponese 8y ago
Having lived here for 20 years, I can say things are a great deal better than they were before the Downtown tech explosion that happened 10 years ago. Market was filled with pushers you would only now only see on 6th St, and I literally saw a drive-by shooting (resulting in murder) on Mission at 19th (Beauty Bar). Both of those things are unthinkable today. I feel like people are forgetting how bad things use to be. [Edited for tappos]
- dawhizkid 8y ago
  There was a double murder in Fillmore 2-3 weeks ago during a busy Sat night.
  - boringg 8y ago
    That's only one.
    - tntn 8y ago
      Perfect for a response to 'nipponese's comment.
      - erikpukinskis 8y ago
        No, perfect would be if they saw the murder. That’d be a direct comparison.
- irq11 8y ago
  I lived there ten years ago, too. You’re remembering selectively. Yes, the Mission has gentrified and mid-market is a bit cleaner. But now there are widespread homeless camps, and open defecation and needles (formerly isolated to certain neighborhoods) are everywhere. And it’s not as if the Mission crime has gone away - it’s just further south now. Property crime is up; even in SOMA, broken car windows were an occasional thing. Now it’s every day. Twin Peaks overlook is a robbery hotspot, and some guy was shot and killed for a camera up there not too long ago. If you only ever visit the gentrified tech zones of SF, you’d be excused for thinking things have improved, but there’s no way to argue about it objectively.
jdlyga 8y ago
Wow, human feces. I've literally never seen that in New York, and I thought we were the dirty ones.
- W-Stool 8y ago
  I spent a few days in NYC recently and I could not believe how clean the city was compared to SF. The difference, at least where I explored, was amazing.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    New York is filthy. Try visiting Chicago sometime.
    - enobrev 8y ago
      I'm from Chicago and spent a third of my life in NYC. I'm honestly amazed at how clean NYC is. The first time I ever saw a ticker-tape parade after the Yankees won the world series in 2000, I assumed NYC would be covered in paper for months. Everything was completely covered in paper! By the next morning you couldn't tell anything happened. Not a single scrap of paper anywhere on the streets or sidewalks. Same thing after the annual West Indian Parade. After the parade, the streets of Canarsie are absolutely taken over by people partying, dancing, drinking, the floats pass back through the neighborhood, and it's just complete chaos. Next day: like nothing happened. They have garbage cans on every corner, and most are managed regularly enough. My wife is from Queens and she constantly complains about how hard it is to find a public garbage can in Chicago. I never realized it before, but she'd absolutely right. Also their snow is handled far more efficiently - even if you don't have an alderman or police chief on your block. NYC is definitely dirtier than Chicago, but it's pretty damned clean, considering how many people there are in such a small space.
mcv 8y ago
20 or 25 years ago, I heard San Francisco get described as "the Amsterdam of the western hemisphere", which put it high on the list of places I'd want to visit some day. Sad to hear it's declined so much. (In the mean time, Amsterdam seems to have improved a lot.)

prolikewhoa 8y ago

Seattle too!

Aloha 8y ago
Seattle is at least marginally cheaper
- dawhizkid 8y ago
  Even though Seattle has gotten more expensive, it still pales in comparison to SF...plus no state income tax.
  - Aloha 8y ago
    My rent has still effectively more than doubled since 2014
davidw 8y ago
Seattle has been building enough that apparently it has started to curb prices. Supply and demand are real. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-rents-growing-at-among-slowest-rates-in-country-as-apartment-boom-reaches-record/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-re...

atom-morgan 8y ago

How is it that so much aggressive political rhetoric related to race and the tech industry is coming from this area if there are very few African Americans there in the first place? I live in Atlanta where the minority population is much higher all around and I don't get the sense at all that there's rampant racism or discrimination. Is this problem unique to the Bay Area or is this largely white guilt?

dawhizkid 8y ago
SF used to having a thriving black population. It has declined for decades due to exclusionary housing policies that have forced low/middle income earners out of the city, which disproportionately affects minorities. But to you question, diversity in tech has little to do with the ethnic makeup of the Bay Area. This is a transient town...people come here to work from all over and it's a completely separate issue.
- scarmig 8y ago
  That leaves out quite a lot. Back in the mid-20th century, the Fillmore was a thriving black community, with around 50k black residents in a relatively central part of the city. The city, however, considered it "blighted." Too many homeless people, too much drug use, too much property and violent crime. And so the SF Redevelopment Agency decided to knock down a bunch of blighted Victorians, relocate the black population, and replace the Victorians with modern apartment buildings. That was the beginning of the end of African American SF. Obviously some relocated to other areas of the city, but just as many left for other pastures. Housing policies since then have hardly helped the situation, but YIMBY types need to understand the history of redevelopment both so they don't make the same mistakes and so they have empathy for when poor folks in a community are skeptical of their promised land.
- tmh79 8y ago
  "This is a transient town...people come here to work from all over and it's a completely separate issue" While true, this elides over a pretty large issue with minorities in tech. In general, the "transient after college" phase, where high potential students move to high potential areas is a privileged position that most people aren't able to participate in for many reasons. Maybe its because your parents (or brothers/sisters/nieces/nephews etc) are struggling and you need to take care of them day today, maybe its because you already have student loans up to the hilt and feel that living at home is a less risky proposition than moving across the country to a place where rent is going to be 2x the size of any paycheck you've ever received, maybe its because you feel the community you come from needs you more than you need a tesla. In general, the types of people who have these types of issues that drive them not to migrate are going to be high performing, but lower wealth, and thus on balance more likely to be non-white all else being equal. IMO, a great way to help make "tech" a more diverse industry would be to open offices in Atlanta, a city with a large black population, and a very good university.

typon 8y ago

The utopia created by hackers on this very site

minikites 8y ago
Every action is political and ignoring that reality is how many of these problems are created in the first place. This is why many tech workers "hate politics", they hate having to be responsible for their actions.
- xenihn 8y ago
  The vast majority of people hate having to be responsible for their actions, no need to single anyone out.
- KirinDave 8y ago
  Most Americans "hate politics" because they've been socialized to, not because they actually do. "Bureaucracy is bad," is an idea deeply seated in the American psyche. It's true though, if more of us went to local government sessions, we could probably just utterly dominate the discourse and reject a lot of NIMBYisms outright, and that'd probably result in a lot of political changes. I myself regret bitterly how much I let my parent's culture influence my opinions on this, and it's only as I get older that I fully appreciate the many toxic and counter-productive ways my fundamental christian socialization has influenced me even as I've struggled to move more left throughout the course of my life.
- TACIXAT 8y ago
  That's a weird assumption. I hate politics due to the influence of money, first past the post voting, and gerrymandering.
- monetus 8y ago
  I have two definitions of politics, to help me think about this. The traditional and perjorative "theater meant to influence a goal" definition, as well as the "earnest, often unconscious, dynamics of a relationship." It is easy to want to avoid the first, but the second is ubiquitous unless you are a self-sufficient hermit.

Communitivity 8y ago

I could so see a planet-bound version of the movie Elysium. The elite top 5% live in walled off fortresses, a la Aeon Flux's city, and have everything - while the rest live outside in a daily fight to live against a dystopian environment financially and economically. I don't think it's inevitable though, so the question is - how do we stop it? We have some of the brighter minds in tech on this forum, what are your thoughts?

atom-morgan 8y ago
Since you mention Elysium, you might find this Twitter thread interesting: https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/1002231716453363712 https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/10022317164533637...
ihm 8y ago
Walking around Pacific Heights gives me that feeling… How to stop it and create a city where anyone can live: - build world class public transit - double the number of houses but decommodify the housing market as much as possible with lots of social housing and controlled rent increases
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  I don't know man? I'm not too sanguine about the possibility of either of those things happening in the United States. Public transit has always kind of gone nowhere in this nation outside of the great coastal cities and Chicago. And as for the housing proposal, I can already hear the howls of "SOCIALISM!!!" that will be raised by certain very powerful interests and political parties.
  - true_religion 8y ago
    Cali is a progressive state. Is socialism really that feared there?
- asdf21 8y ago
  >How to stop it and create a city where anyone can live I'd say if "building a city where anyone can live" is the highest goal, that's an issue in and of itself. Would you want to work for a company "where anyone could work?"

asveikau 8y ago

> very few kids/families, I am raising my kids here and disagree with your assessment. There is a pretty good community of families here.

diab0lic 8y ago
That's all well and good that you disagree, but SF has 13.4% persons under 18 compared to the national average of 22.6% [0]. There are very few kids / families. [0] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/sanfranciscocitycalifornia,US/PST045217 https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/sanfranciscocit...
- francisofascii 8y ago
  I wonder if there are specific neighborhoods with families closer to the national average?
- asveikau 8y ago
  You say something mathematically precise and then switch into a vague "very few". Take some walks around the parks and go people watching, you will get a better feel for what that "very few" can mean. 13% of 800,000 is about 100,000. Very few.
  - diab0lic 8y ago
    I was restating the line you quoted, and yes precisely SF has very few families compared to other cities in the US. A sister comment seems to indicate that even NYC is 24% (I haven't verified this.) So even for similar urbanization levels SF has very few families.
    - asveikau 8y ago
      Go look around. There are a lot of kids. My point isn't about in comparison to other cities, it is more, does a smaller rate really mean "few" and how much of a problem is it really. It's not the problem that the most negative naysayers will claim. Note I didn't say something like "affordability poses no problems for families". Because it does. But there is indeed a vibrant community.

closeparen 8y ago

Not to dismiss this completely, but there are neighborhoods with lots of kids around. SOMA just isn’t one of them.

dawhizkid 8y ago
SF has one of the lowest % of kids of any major US city. https://www.sfgate.com/mommyfiles/article/Many-families-leave-San-Francisco-but-what-about-10887001.php https://www.sfgate.com/mommyfiles/article/Many-families-leav...
- closeparen 8y ago
  I should rephrase: there are definitely neighborhoods with lots of babies and toddlers. School aged children are a rare sight.
- KirinDave 8y ago
  What's curious: this stat actually fails to represent quite how many parents from more normal surroudning communities bring their kids into SF because of the co-op school opportunities there. SF has done a lot of work to make co-op schools work, so lots of people with kids under 9 (myself included) find outright superior education options by bringing our kids into SF. It does involve putting parent hours towards the school, but many people with young kids are already geared for less raw hours towards work (either through superior economic resources or local support; everyone who can't hack it relies purely on the public systems).

KirinDave 8y ago

So let's build more facilities to help deal with the homeless problem rather than whining about why we can't just ship them off to an even bigger city, the way the rest of the western US does? We cannot stop other cities from doing this to us. So we are going to have to stop whining and cope.

nipponese 8y ago

Having lived here for 20 years, I can say things are a great deal better than they were before the Downtown tech explosion that happened 10 years ago. Market was filled with pushers you would only now only see on 6th St, and I literally saw a drive-by shooting (resulting in murder) on Mission at 19th (Beauty Bar). Both of those things are unthinkable today. I feel like people are forgetting how bad things use to be. [Edited for tappos]

dawhizkid 8y ago
There was a double murder in Fillmore 2-3 weeks ago during a busy Sat night.
- boringg 8y ago
  That's only one.
  - tntn 8y ago
    Perfect for a response to 'nipponese's comment.
    - erikpukinskis 8y ago
      No, perfect would be if they saw the murder. That’d be a direct comparison.
irq11 8y ago
I lived there ten years ago, too. You’re remembering selectively. Yes, the Mission has gentrified and mid-market is a bit cleaner. But now there are widespread homeless camps, and open defecation and needles (formerly isolated to certain neighborhoods) are everywhere. And it’s not as if the Mission crime has gone away - it’s just further south now. Property crime is up; even in SOMA, broken car windows were an occasional thing. Now it’s every day. Twin Peaks overlook is a robbery hotspot, and some guy was shot and killed for a camera up there not too long ago. If you only ever visit the gentrified tech zones of SF, you’d be excused for thinking things have improved, but there’s no way to argue about it objectively.

jdlyga 8y ago

Wow, human feces. I've literally never seen that in New York, and I thought we were the dirty ones.

W-Stool 8y ago
I spent a few days in NYC recently and I could not believe how clean the city was compared to SF. The difference, at least where I explored, was amazing.
- rayiner 8y ago
  New York is filthy. Try visiting Chicago sometime.
  - enobrev 8y ago
    I'm from Chicago and spent a third of my life in NYC. I'm honestly amazed at how clean NYC is. The first time I ever saw a ticker-tape parade after the Yankees won the world series in 2000, I assumed NYC would be covered in paper for months. Everything was completely covered in paper! By the next morning you couldn't tell anything happened. Not a single scrap of paper anywhere on the streets or sidewalks. Same thing after the annual West Indian Parade. After the parade, the streets of Canarsie are absolutely taken over by people partying, dancing, drinking, the floats pass back through the neighborhood, and it's just complete chaos. Next day: like nothing happened. They have garbage cans on every corner, and most are managed regularly enough. My wife is from Queens and she constantly complains about how hard it is to find a public garbage can in Chicago. I never realized it before, but she'd absolutely right. Also their snow is handled far more efficiently - even if you don't have an alderman or police chief on your block. NYC is definitely dirtier than Chicago, but it's pretty damned clean, considering how many people there are in such a small space.

mcv 8y ago

20 or 25 years ago, I heard San Francisco get described as "the Amsterdam of the western hemisphere", which put it high on the list of places I'd want to visit some day. Sad to hear it's declined so much. (In the mean time, Amsterdam seems to have improved a lot.)