10 ms·

'We all suffer': why San Francisco techies hate the city they transformed

86 points by _0o6v 7y ago

traderjane 7y ago
Why is it that despite high housing prices everywhere in the tech region, homelessness appears acutely concentrated in SF?
- sametmax 7y ago
  I'd imagine: Hot weather and good infrastructures so you can live in the street. Liberal so you are not bashed out by the cops. Rich so you can beg for money. Many water points. Strength in number.
- huffmsa 7y ago
  Versus the outlying suburbia? Because it's harder to get around in suburbia. Cities are easier to walk / ride your bike around and you're just a face in the crowd. People notice you if you're camped out in a suburban shopping mall.
  - huffmsa 7y ago
    Or versus another city, it's the weather. Never hot enough to turn you into jerky, never cold enough to turn you into a popsicle. Since piles of people dead from exposure isn't a risk, the city doesn't have the same motivation to build shelters like a New York does, so they kick it to the side. The citizenry gets concerned with poop on the street, but once it's bodies, they really expect the government to do something.
    - huffmsa 7y ago
      So, now that the government can safely do nothing, why won't the private sector fill in? 3 part answer: 1) my understanding of the political lean of the city is that the government is the great social savior. 2) most private groups who take care of the homeless and otherwise destitute havehistorically had a religious affiliation. 3) private groups have to deal with the same real estate prices as everyone else, and because of 1 and 2 and the general skepticism of religion by the citizenry, they won't be given any tax breaks or land price cuts, meaning they simply cannot afford to setup service. It really is a self feeding system of misery-but-not-enough-to-kill-you all the way around.
      - pjc50 7y ago
        There is literally no money in it, so obviously the private sector isn't going to do anything. You might get a bit of "third sector" charity, but it's always inadequate wherever you go.
    - thaumasiotes 7y ago
      > The citizenry gets concerned with poop on the street This does not appear to be true for San Francisco.
      - huffmsa 7y ago
        Concerned, but not enough to really do anything about it.
- henrikschroder 7y ago
  Because solutions that work (Free mental health care, free housing, more social workers) are not palatable to the people who live there, despite the city having more than enough money to actually pay for those solutions. So an endless parade of soup kitchens it is.
  - traderjane 7y ago
    It's hard to imagine surrounding cities are different because of free mental health care, free housing, and more social service support for homelessness.
    - henrikschroder 7y ago
      Homelessness is not a problem that affects all cities alike. It's not the case that Daly City, Mountain View, Pleasanton etc, have all solved the problem without telling SF how to do it. In reality, the surrounding cities simply don't have the problem for various reasons and environmental factors, so they don't need to solve the problem in the first place.
      - A2017U1 7y ago
        My experience in very poor metropolises across the plamet is that it's an entirely simple problem to solve. My experience in some of the most expensive cities on Earth is that providing housing for the poor devalues the only nestegg most people have and is widely railed against by the masses. Its a Ponzi scheme first and foremost, housing simply cannot outpace wages, it's impossible. When it all comes crashing down is someone elses problem though hey :)
  - cutler 7y ago
    There are plenty of soup kitchens here in London and reliance on them is rising.
- DanBC 7y ago
  Services for homeless people (housing, drug treatment, mental health, employment, etc etc) tend to be concentrated in cities.
  - YorkshireSeason 7y ago
    As of July 2019, there is no know way that cures drug addition with even moderate degrees of success. Indeed, even the very definition of addiction is still controversial. From [1]: "[D]efining addiction is not an easy task and still represents a considerable source of scholarly dispute. The term addiction has been and it is still used in at least three different ways. [(i) I]t is used as a lay term, which entered the English language in the late sixteenth century (maybe owing to Shakespeare) to indicate inclination or proclivity for certain habits or activities, in both its positive and negative connotations, including excessive drinking and smoking. [(ii)]Since the late nineteenth century, addiction is also used as a medical term to indicate pathological, compulsive drug use [...] [(iii) A]ddiction is used as a psychological construct to indicate a compulsive motivational drive [...] Instances of all three meanings abound in the scholarly literature, sometimes within the same paper." OTOH, drug dealers, too, obtain economies of scale by concentrating drug users in close physical proximity (and vice versa). It seems to be plausible to assume that the easy availability of drugs is itself causally contributing to drug use and drug addiction. [1] A. Badiani, Is a 'general' theory of addiction possible? A commentary on: a multistep general theory of transition to addiction. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24888430 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24888430
- drdrey 7y ago
  There are also plenty of homeless makeshift camps in San Jose. In parks, alongs highways, underpasses, near creeks...
- golergka 7y ago
  Because SF treats homeless better and has much more services for them, and (being homeless) they are very mobile.
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  In my city if I were homeless I'd want to be central not in the suburbs. There are better services for homeless, more other homeless people to blend in with, opportunities to beg, places to find shelter etc.
- crawfordcomeaux 7y ago
  I'm wondering what the city's waste looks like. I bet there's a lot of nice stuff and food being thrown away. What's it like to dumpster dive in the city with the most billionaires per capita?
chvid 7y ago
I find it amazing that "locals" can get away with blaming "tech workers" for rising rents and homelessness. The rents and the house prices only rise because the wealth that the workers generate is blocked from being used to build new houses.
- gshdg 7y ago
  Local renters != local property owners
- q3k 7y ago
  Really? Only because of that? No other reason?
  - chvid 7y ago
    Yes. It is actually pretty simple. A place like SF has the choice between converting the wealth its citizens generate into more housing or higher house prices. It is a political choice.
- mcv 7y ago
  But why? Why isn't all that wealth being used to make the city more livable? More affordable for the poor? More diverse?
  - CalRobert 7y ago
    Because making it more affordable to the poor means increasing the housing supply, which means reducing the price of homes, which existing homeowners hate.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - mcv 7y ago
      But it's the people who live there who are complaining. Besides I doubt that stepping over homeless people is good for the price of homes. Increasing the housing supply, if there's room for that, seems like a no-brainer.
cribbles 7y ago
>A million-plus for a home with $300,000 down? Then when we have kids, $30,000 a year for private school? This quote totally confounded me. Why is it a given that their kids have to go to private school? If you're optimizing your budget for home-ownership, why not just send your kids to the schools your taxes are paying for?
- ainiriand 7y ago
  Because the public system sucks and the more money you have for that the more opportunities they will have.
  - mcv 7y ago
    That the school system sucks is not an unavoidable fact of life, it's a problem that needs to be fixed. I admit, another problem on the big pile of problems that need to be fixed, apparently.
    - sundvor 7y ago
      It doesn't suck in countries such as Australia and Norway.
      - jfnixon 7y ago
        Whatever could the difference be??
        420codebro 7y ago
        This mystery will be with us for a long time. Real stumper.
        flukus 7y ago
        State level funding is a big one, poor areas get the same funding for local schools as wealthy areas. I don't understand why "progressives" in the US don't support a more egalitarian funding model, it seems like a very achievable goal and compensates for quite a few privileges.
brokenkebab 7y ago
It's hilarious to read all these militaristic wordings about techies waging "battles", and "conquering" the city, as if it's about barbarian hordes which came down on peaceful SF, pillaged, raped, and burnt everything to the ground. Sure, why scritinize California's, or the city's political theater, why questioning law enforcement inefficiency. Can it be somehow related to drugs, prostitution, and theft? No, it's all software developers' fault.
- atoav 7y ago
  Technology has a transformative effect on society and the way we live. This is why old cities look like they look (built before cars and trains were a thing) and this is why most US cites look like they look (built during the prime of the car age). Similar things are certainly true for other technology, even for the (tolerated) side products of said technology. Is any single person at fault here? Probably not. They mostly acted rationally within their small horizon, but together they created a problem, even for themselves. We have similar problems when it comes to markets and global warming. Many individually rational decisions can lead to negative outcomes for the whole. There is a very good episode on the Omega Tau Podcast on precisely that problem: https://pca.st/t8Yd https://pca.st/t8Yd The interviewed Scientist Dr. Igor Nikolic focused on the design of a co-evolutionary method for constructing Agent Based Models of the evolution of Large Scale Socio-Technical systems in the TU Delft in the Netherlands and tries to tackle problems like these, where you'd be lost without a more systemic view of the problem.
  - brokenkebab 7y ago
    I appreciate your effort in trying to explain your opinion, but it's unclear how it is related to my comment above. To clarify: it's sarcastic reaction to the story's bias, and shallowness.
    - atoav 7y ago
      It seems I didn't get your sarcastic tone then, sorry for the inconvenience.
- 7y ago
Karishma12347 7y ago
Even though people think SF as some kind of tech hub, the reality is that Tech's share of employment and tax revenue in SF is going down year on year.
- noobermin 7y ago
  Is this really true? Evidence for it?
kieckerjan 7y ago
European here. My girlfriend and I are excited to do a tour of the West Coast later this year. As a tech I feel it would be silly to skip San Francisco and Silicon Valley, but I must say the stories I have been hearing have dampened my initial enthusiasm considerably. I now wonder if it is worth our while. If "avocado toast and class warfare" are the main attractions nowadays, we can probably spend our time more wisely.
- thinkingemote 7y ago
  There's not much to see in SV apart from the computer history museum, unless you like seeing parking lots and industrial buildings.
  - ableal 7y ago
    The Stanford campus is worth a visit.
  - lm28469 7y ago
    On the other hand there are many nice places around the valley. I think that's the only thing I miss from the valley, drive 40 min in any direction and you're either in a forest, a desert, on top of a mountain or at a sea side. I live in berlin now and it's quite the opposite, the city if full of life but the nature sucks for a good 200km radius. Mountain roads with nice view on top: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/37.5880399,-121.8692997/37.4038633,-121.8379315/@37.4808906,-121.8296154,12.04z/data=!4m2!4m1!3e0 https://www.google.com/maps/dir/37.5880399,-121.8692997/37.4... Nice road in the woods: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/37.5880399,-121.8692997/37.4038633,-121.8379315/@37.4808906,-121.8296154,12.04z/data=!4m2!4m1!3e0 https://www.google.com/maps/dir/37.5880399,-121.8692997/37.4... Small twisty road to santa cruz: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/37.5880399,-121.8692997/37.4038633,-121.8379315/@37.4808906,-121.8296154,12.04z/data=!4m2!4m1!3e0 https://www.google.com/maps/dir/37.5880399,-121.8692997/37.4... I also remember remote hiking trails going up the hills south of mountain view but I can't place them on the map. They were always empty, best place to chill and get out of the stressful environment.
    - 7y ago
bubblewrap 7y ago
"It should be noted that Zoe, who asked not to be identified by her real name because she was not authorized by her employer to speak to the press, is not the stereotypical tech bro who moves to San Francisco for a job and immediately starts complaining about the city’s dire homelessness crisis. She arrived in 2007 to study at San Francisco State University and had a career in musical theater before attending a coding bootcamp and landing a job as a developer advocate at a major tech company." Um, how is she not exactly that? Except that she is a girl, so I guess not a bro. What would you say to girls? "Tech chick"? Or just "Tech sis"? "It’s just not sustainable for a couple to live here" Then don't? I write this as somebody who also moved away from his hometown and now can't afford to go back. "she says she is terrified to walk at night." And how exactly did Tech workers cause that? Is there even data showing the homeless and drug addicts are former residents of SF, who were then displaced by rising housing costs because of tech workers? I don't know why SF with all its money can't get a grip on the problem. But it also seems likely to me that many homeless were simply attracted by the rich people, who can donate more than people elsewhere?
dnrvs 7y ago
lmao the defensiveness in this thread. boiling frogs
peterwwillis 7y ago
When I first visited 7 years ago, it was already an insufferable combination of homeless detritus and Java talk at dive bars. I was finally able to find the alternative scenes the city was [previously] famous for, but all around was an encroaching sense of 'other' smothering the unique identity of the city. And the rent was already too damn high. Soon after, Oakland was being inundated by its escapees. I felt badly for the locals, but more than anything I wanted never to live there. I would work as a high school network admin in Ohio before I would join the tech gold rush. I've been mostly happy on the east coast, but gentrification's steady gears are erasing local culture here too. I'm pretty sick of cities now - the noise, crime, filth, expense, lack of green space and clean air. But terrible public transportation outside of cities requires paying the ecological, monetary, and in-convenience costs of cars. Suburbia has its own negative effect on society, by drawing away tax revenue from cities and abandoning small businesses. 'Escaping' would come with its own costs, and only help myself. I don't see a clear solution, but it has to start with a focus on improving society as a whole. More and better public transportation, housing, food, and education will greatly help things, but it needs to be integrated everywhere; not doled out like alms, or in whatever the highest taxed county is. We need a balance between the selfish act of consumption and the hard work of improving society for other people, which will actually benefit us more in the long run.
RandomInteger4 7y ago
What's the overlap between techies and San Fran's politicians and politically active individuals who prevent the necessary steps from being taken regarding housing policies? EDIT for clarity: What percentage of those responsible for the horrible laws there were actually techies?

86 points by _0o6v 7y ago

Why is it that despite high housing prices everywhere in the tech region, homelessness appears acutely concentrated in SF?

sametmax 7y ago
I'd imagine: Hot weather and good infrastructures so you can live in the street. Liberal so you are not bashed out by the cops. Rich so you can beg for money. Many water points. Strength in number.
huffmsa 7y ago
Versus the outlying suburbia? Because it's harder to get around in suburbia. Cities are easier to walk / ride your bike around and you're just a face in the crowd. People notice you if you're camped out in a suburban shopping mall.
- huffmsa 7y ago
  Or versus another city, it's the weather. Never hot enough to turn you into jerky, never cold enough to turn you into a popsicle. Since piles of people dead from exposure isn't a risk, the city doesn't have the same motivation to build shelters like a New York does, so they kick it to the side. The citizenry gets concerned with poop on the street, but once it's bodies, they really expect the government to do something.
  - huffmsa 7y ago
    So, now that the government can safely do nothing, why won't the private sector fill in? 3 part answer: 1) my understanding of the political lean of the city is that the government is the great social savior. 2) most private groups who take care of the homeless and otherwise destitute havehistorically had a religious affiliation. 3) private groups have to deal with the same real estate prices as everyone else, and because of 1 and 2 and the general skepticism of religion by the citizenry, they won't be given any tax breaks or land price cuts, meaning they simply cannot afford to setup service. It really is a self feeding system of misery-but-not-enough-to-kill-you all the way around.
    - pjc50 7y ago
      There is literally no money in it, so obviously the private sector isn't going to do anything. You might get a bit of "third sector" charity, but it's always inadequate wherever you go.
  - thaumasiotes 7y ago
    > The citizenry gets concerned with poop on the street This does not appear to be true for San Francisco.
    - huffmsa 7y ago
      Concerned, but not enough to really do anything about it.
henrikschroder 7y ago
Because solutions that work (Free mental health care, free housing, more social workers) are not palatable to the people who live there, despite the city having more than enough money to actually pay for those solutions. So an endless parade of soup kitchens it is.
- traderjane 7y ago
  It's hard to imagine surrounding cities are different because of free mental health care, free housing, and more social service support for homelessness.
  - henrikschroder 7y ago
    Homelessness is not a problem that affects all cities alike. It's not the case that Daly City, Mountain View, Pleasanton etc, have all solved the problem without telling SF how to do it. In reality, the surrounding cities simply don't have the problem for various reasons and environmental factors, so they don't need to solve the problem in the first place.
    - A2017U1 7y ago
      My experience in very poor metropolises across the plamet is that it's an entirely simple problem to solve. My experience in some of the most expensive cities on Earth is that providing housing for the poor devalues the only nestegg most people have and is widely railed against by the masses. Its a Ponzi scheme first and foremost, housing simply cannot outpace wages, it's impossible. When it all comes crashing down is someone elses problem though hey :)
- cutler 7y ago
  There are plenty of soup kitchens here in London and reliance on them is rising.
DanBC 7y ago
Services for homeless people (housing, drug treatment, mental health, employment, etc etc) tend to be concentrated in cities.
- YorkshireSeason 7y ago
  As of July 2019, there is no know way that cures drug addition with even moderate degrees of success. Indeed, even the very definition of addiction is still controversial. From [1]: "[D]efining addiction is not an easy task and still represents a considerable source of scholarly dispute. The term addiction has been and it is still used in at least three different ways. [(i) I]t is used as a lay term, which entered the English language in the late sixteenth century (maybe owing to Shakespeare) to indicate inclination or proclivity for certain habits or activities, in both its positive and negative connotations, including excessive drinking and smoking. [(ii)]Since the late nineteenth century, addiction is also used as a medical term to indicate pathological, compulsive drug use [...] [(iii) A]ddiction is used as a psychological construct to indicate a compulsive motivational drive [...] Instances of all three meanings abound in the scholarly literature, sometimes within the same paper." OTOH, drug dealers, too, obtain economies of scale by concentrating drug users in close physical proximity (and vice versa). It seems to be plausible to assume that the easy availability of drugs is itself causally contributing to drug use and drug addiction. [1] A. Badiani, Is a 'general' theory of addiction possible? A commentary on: a multistep general theory of transition to addiction. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24888430 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24888430
drdrey 7y ago
There are also plenty of homeless makeshift camps in San Jose. In parks, alongs highways, underpasses, near creeks...
golergka 7y ago
Because SF treats homeless better and has much more services for them, and (being homeless) they are very mobile.
quickthrower2 7y ago
In my city if I were homeless I'd want to be central not in the suburbs. There are better services for homeless, more other homeless people to blend in with, opportunities to beg, places to find shelter etc.
crawfordcomeaux 7y ago
I'm wondering what the city's waste looks like. I bet there's a lot of nice stuff and food being thrown away. What's it like to dumpster dive in the city with the most billionaires per capita?

chvid 7y ago

I find it amazing that "locals" can get away with blaming "tech workers" for rising rents and homelessness. The rents and the house prices only rise because the wealth that the workers generate is blocked from being used to build new houses.

gshdg 7y ago
Local renters != local property owners
q3k 7y ago
Really? Only because of that? No other reason?
- chvid 7y ago
  Yes. It is actually pretty simple. A place like SF has the choice between converting the wealth its citizens generate into more housing or higher house prices. It is a political choice.
mcv 7y ago
But why? Why isn't all that wealth being used to make the city more livable? More affordable for the poor? More diverse?
- CalRobert 7y ago
  Because making it more affordable to the poor means increasing the housing supply, which means reducing the price of homes, which existing homeowners hate.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - mcv 7y ago
    But it's the people who live there who are complaining. Besides I doubt that stepping over homeless people is good for the price of homes. Increasing the housing supply, if there's room for that, seems like a no-brainer.

cribbles 7y ago

>A million-plus for a home with $300,000 down? Then when we have kids, $30,000 a year for private school? This quote totally confounded me. Why is it a given that their kids have to go to private school? If you're optimizing your budget for home-ownership, why not just send your kids to the schools your taxes are paying for?

ainiriand 7y ago
Because the public system sucks and the more money you have for that the more opportunities they will have.
- mcv 7y ago
  That the school system sucks is not an unavoidable fact of life, it's a problem that needs to be fixed. I admit, another problem on the big pile of problems that need to be fixed, apparently.
  - sundvor 7y ago
    It doesn't suck in countries such as Australia and Norway.
    - jfnixon 7y ago
      Whatever could the difference be??
      - 420codebro 7y ago
        This mystery will be with us for a long time. Real stumper.
      - flukus 7y ago
        State level funding is a big one, poor areas get the same funding for local schools as wealthy areas. I don't understand why "progressives" in the US don't support a more egalitarian funding model, it seems like a very achievable goal and compensates for quite a few privileges.

brokenkebab 7y ago

It's hilarious to read all these militaristic wordings about techies waging "battles", and "conquering" the city, as if it's about barbarian hordes which came down on peaceful SF, pillaged, raped, and burnt everything to the ground. Sure, why scritinize California's, or the city's political theater, why questioning law enforcement inefficiency. Can it be somehow related to drugs, prostitution, and theft? No, it's all software developers' fault.

atoav 7y ago
Technology has a transformative effect on society and the way we live. This is why old cities look like they look (built before cars and trains were a thing) and this is why most US cites look like they look (built during the prime of the car age). Similar things are certainly true for other technology, even for the (tolerated) side products of said technology. Is any single person at fault here? Probably not. They mostly acted rationally within their small horizon, but together they created a problem, even for themselves. We have similar problems when it comes to markets and global warming. Many individually rational decisions can lead to negative outcomes for the whole. There is a very good episode on the Omega Tau Podcast on precisely that problem: https://pca.st/t8Yd https://pca.st/t8Yd The interviewed Scientist Dr. Igor Nikolic focused on the design of a co-evolutionary method for constructing Agent Based Models of the evolution of Large Scale Socio-Technical systems in the TU Delft in the Netherlands and tries to tackle problems like these, where you'd be lost without a more systemic view of the problem.
- brokenkebab 7y ago
  I appreciate your effort in trying to explain your opinion, but it's unclear how it is related to my comment above. To clarify: it's sarcastic reaction to the story's bias, and shallowness.
  - atoav 7y ago
    It seems I didn't get your sarcastic tone then, sorry for the inconvenience.
7y ago

Karishma12347 7y ago

Even though people think SF as some kind of tech hub, the reality is that Tech's share of employment and tax revenue in SF is going down year on year.

noobermin 7y ago
Is this really true? Evidence for it?

kieckerjan 7y ago

European here. My girlfriend and I are excited to do a tour of the West Coast later this year. As a tech I feel it would be silly to skip San Francisco and Silicon Valley, but I must say the stories I have been hearing have dampened my initial enthusiasm considerably. I now wonder if it is worth our while. If "avocado toast and class warfare" are the main attractions nowadays, we can probably spend our time more wisely.

thinkingemote 7y ago
There's not much to see in SV apart from the computer history museum, unless you like seeing parking lots and industrial buildings.
- ableal 7y ago
  The Stanford campus is worth a visit.
- lm28469 7y ago
  On the other hand there are many nice places around the valley. I think that's the only thing I miss from the valley, drive 40 min in any direction and you're either in a forest, a desert, on top of a mountain or at a sea side. I live in berlin now and it's quite the opposite, the city if full of life but the nature sucks for a good 200km radius. Mountain roads with nice view on top: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/37.5880399,-121.8692997/37.4038633,-121.8379315/@37.4808906,-121.8296154,12.04z/data=!4m2!4m1!3e0 https://www.google.com/maps/dir/37.5880399,-121.8692997/37.4... Nice road in the woods: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/37.5880399,-121.8692997/37.4038633,-121.8379315/@37.4808906,-121.8296154,12.04z/data=!4m2!4m1!3e0 https://www.google.com/maps/dir/37.5880399,-121.8692997/37.4... Small twisty road to santa cruz: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/37.5880399,-121.8692997/37.4038633,-121.8379315/@37.4808906,-121.8296154,12.04z/data=!4m2!4m1!3e0 https://www.google.com/maps/dir/37.5880399,-121.8692997/37.4... I also remember remote hiking trails going up the hills south of mountain view but I can't place them on the map. They were always empty, best place to chill and get out of the stressful environment.
  - 7y ago

bubblewrap 7y ago

"It should be noted that Zoe, who asked not to be identified by her real name because she was not authorized by her employer to speak to the press, is not the stereotypical tech bro who moves to San Francisco for a job and immediately starts complaining about the city’s dire homelessness crisis. She arrived in 2007 to study at San Francisco State University and had a career in musical theater before attending a coding bootcamp and landing a job as a developer advocate at a major tech company." Um, how is she not exactly that? Except that she is a girl, so I guess not a bro. What would you say to girls? "Tech chick"? Or just "Tech sis"? "It’s just not sustainable for a couple to live here" Then don't? I write this as somebody who also moved away from his hometown and now can't afford to go back. "she says she is terrified to walk at night." And how exactly did Tech workers cause that? Is there even data showing the homeless and drug addicts are former residents of SF, who were then displaced by rising housing costs because of tech workers? I don't know why SF with all its money can't get a grip on the problem. But it also seems likely to me that many homeless were simply attracted by the rich people, who can donate more than people elsewhere?

dnrvs 7y ago

lmao the defensiveness in this thread. boiling frogs

peterwwillis 7y ago

When I first visited 7 years ago, it was already an insufferable combination of homeless detritus and Java talk at dive bars. I was finally able to find the alternative scenes the city was [previously] famous for, but all around was an encroaching sense of 'other' smothering the unique identity of the city. And the rent was already too damn high. Soon after, Oakland was being inundated by its escapees. I felt badly for the locals, but more than anything I wanted never to live there. I would work as a high school network admin in Ohio before I would join the tech gold rush. I've been mostly happy on the east coast, but gentrification's steady gears are erasing local culture here too. I'm pretty sick of cities now - the noise, crime, filth, expense, lack of green space and clean air. But terrible public transportation outside of cities requires paying the ecological, monetary, and in-convenience costs of cars. Suburbia has its own negative effect on society, by drawing away tax revenue from cities and abandoning small businesses. 'Escaping' would come with its own costs, and only help myself. I don't see a clear solution, but it has to start with a focus on improving society as a whole. More and better public transportation, housing, food, and education will greatly help things, but it needs to be integrated everywhere; not doled out like alms, or in whatever the highest taxed county is. We need a balance between the selfish act of consumption and the hard work of improving society for other people, which will actually benefit us more in the long run.

RandomInteger4 7y ago

What's the overlap between techies and San Fran's politicians and politically active individuals who prevent the necessary steps from being taken regarding housing policies? EDIT for clarity: What percentage of those responsible for the horrible laws there were actually techies?