9 ms·

San Francisco Spent a Decade Being Rich, Important, and Hating Itself

65 points by smadge 7y ago

desert_boi 7y ago
For anyone that hasn't seen it, _Cities Without Suburbs_ is a book that lays out the case that fragmentation and infighting are a major hindrance on American metro areas. San Francisco is bounded on all sides from expanding, so it's partially at the mercy of its suburbs when it comes to things like housing. Has there ever been a movement to consolidate the Bay Area like how Nashville consolidated 14(?) counties with the city itself?
- x3n0ph3n3 7y ago
  Given how poorly San Francisco is run and how corrupt its politics are, I don't think anyone outside of San Francisco would want that.
  - CoolGuySteve 7y ago
    Silicon Valley could at least consolidate. I used to live on the border of Cupertino and Sunnyvale. The sales tax was different depending on which side of Homestead Rd I was on. What was the fucking point of that? Were the culture and values of Sunnyvale really that antithetical to those of Cupertino? It would be really nice if one of these parking lot hamlets actually did act differently and zone themselves to be super dense but when I left councilors were still mostly arguing about public WiFi and paying millions to water those plants in the road dividers all summer long.
    - masonic 7y ago
      ...on the border of Cupertino and Sunnyvale. The sales tax was different depending on which side of Homestead No, that's never been the case. Neither Sunnyvale nor Cupertino has a city sales tax.
      - masonic 7y ago
        Um, downvoters, it's the truth. City-specific sales tax is rare in CA; generally, parcel taxes, bonds, etc. are pursued instead.
        x3n0ph3n3 7y ago
        He's probably confusing his cities. Santa Clara has a 0.25% city sales tax, among other cities in the county: https://www.salestaxhandbook.com/california/rates/santa-clara-county https://www.salestaxhandbook.com/california/rates/santa-clar... San Mateo county also has a few cities with their own sales tax: https://www.salestaxhandbook.com/california/rates/san-mateo-county https://www.salestaxhandbook.com/california/rates/san-mateo-...
- wbl 7y ago
  San Francisco added 13 jobs for every home over the past decade, making it by far the worst housing actor. The suburbs of SF are the whole western half of the city.
- Apocryphon 7y ago
  That's what happened to San Jose in the '50s-'60s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._P._Hamann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._P._Hamann
allovernow 7y ago
> Hordes of newly minted and newly wealthy tech bros, flush with Silicon Valley VC cash, ruined what once had been an all-are-welcome cool, gray city of love, where the funky landlady Anna This article nicely represents the narccisistic hubris of the ivory tower leftist viewpoint, and in-group social behavior at large. Tech Bros are the nerds that were (and still are, despite shallow appropriations of nerd culture in the mainstream) cast off from "normal" society. This has been the norm in the U.S. for decades. It's not cool to be smart and have geeky interests. Now tech is hot and the in-group is having trouble competing with people for whom this wasn't just a job or a class, or even a hobby, it was an escape. So they go after their characters to justify quotas and the now deliberate social stigma they were previously oblivious to enforcing. Tech Bros is a dirty class stereotype which totally ignores the passion and skill of the people who are revolutionizing society, for better or worse. And at the end of the day it's just the weird nerd kids being bullied as always. There's an obscure blog by a guy who talks about the three or so stages of popular subcultures, and how one of the three groups eventualy ruin everything, linked in the comments below which is related.
- majos 7y ago
  > There's an obscure blog by a guy who talks about the three or so stages of popular trends, and how three groups of people interact to eventually ruin any nice thing. If anyone knows that I'm talking about I'd appreciate a link! https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
- dehrmann 7y ago
  Honest question: are tech bros bros who upped their tech game or nerds who got bro game?
  - mc32 7y ago
    It’s an epithet conjured up by journalists plugging in to the angst created by city policies and cast onto a ready and easy target.
    - 7y ago
pascalxus 7y ago
The decision of the Mayor back in 2012 to attract a bunch of Tech companies to the city that wanted growth the LEAST, is highly questionable. It's just such a contradiction of what the locals wanted. And, now we're paying the price, litteraly. In SF, I used to think the answer was to build more housing, lots more. But, after hearing from sooooo many NIMBYs and so much extreme angst against any kind of growth, I've come to realize that SF doesn't deserve tech companies or any companies for that matter. It's time to accept what the locals want and start acting like it. Remove the incentives for companies in SF and start applying disentives. Tech needs a new home, a new city, perhaps one that hasn't been built yet. Perhaps one where innovation will be welcomed instead of stifled. One, where inclusiveness is all encompassing (and applies to housing) and not just a catchphrase used to be politically correct. One that isn't covered in poop. A city where enough housing supply can be built for everyone.
- dehrmann 7y ago
  > The decision of the Mayor back in 2012 to attract a bunch of Tech companies to the city Do you mean the tax break for companies in the mid-market area, aka the Twitter tax break? There's definitely some tech around there, but I think SoMa has a lot more. The big ones, Google, Facebook, and Salesforce, aren't there.
- Gunax 7y ago
  The USA is such a vast country, there are so many nice areas. We don't need to cram all of one industry into a single city. I vote Denver, Seattle, or Pittsburgh.
  - Apocryphon 7y ago
    As far as animosity towards tech workers and rising housing costs go, Seattle is second only to San Francisco and Austin.
  - boring_twenties 7y ago
    Denver and Seattle are both already having extreme housing shortages, congestion, and in the case of Seattle an anti-tech backlash.
thatsenough 7y ago
What made San Francisco what it is today? It's not the soft-on-crime District Attorney who cleared out the prisons by releasing criminals back onto the street. Not the soft-on-crime SFPD, who barely enforces the law because what's the point? The DA won't prosecute anyway. Not the fact that the hippies grew up and moved to Marin, and marijuana and mushrooms have been replaced with fentanyl and methamphetamine. It's certainly not the bustling drug market that operates in 24 hours a day without police interference in the Tenderloin around Hyde and Golden Gate, making the city a go-to destination for drug addicts from across the region. It's not the hundreds of millions of dollars the city hands out each year to homelessness advocacy groups that have no accountability and deliver no results. It's not the entrenched NIMBYs who fight housing development tooth and nail. It's the tech bros.
- um_ya 7y ago
  It's hard to change others, but it's easy to change yourself. It's easier to just move to a more conservative state or a more welcoming city with less taxes and less restrictions. I appreciate those that choose to stay and fight, but sometimes it's better just to move on. San Francisco has been getting worse.
  - fredsanford 7y ago
    >> San Francisco has been getting worse. From my first visit there in ~'93 to my last in ~'99 SF felt like it was going downhill quickly. I would not have gone back voluntarily after the first visit if not for job requirements. I had an uncle who lived in Hayward who complained about both areas a lot. After reading the news about needles, mental patients, shitting in the street etc... I dunno how it could get worse.
  - someguydave 7y ago
    Yes but if you move to a more conservative state please leave your extreme left wing politics behind.
- smadge 7y ago
  I think the article was more nuanced than that.
baron816 7y ago
The vilification of the “tech bro” is really such a tragedy (I know, preaching to the choir here). We’re just people, trying to make a living for ourselves, and doing the things we enjoy. Our culture is no better than anyone else’s. But neither is that of those lived in the Bay Area for the previous decades. Why should we be denied the life we were meant to live because they were here first and they don’t have room for us? There’s plenty of room for everyone to coexist, if we make it.
- Apocryphon 7y ago
  But that's the thing- there isn't plenty of room, both in terms of affordable housing, and in actual housing (SF is 49 sq. miles hemmed in by the sea). And as our industry gets more entrenched, we are creating that which is directly in contravention of one of our craft's most important axioms: a monoculture.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - wbl 7y ago
    49 square miles used improperly. We could house millions with the ancient technology of the apartment building.
  - ericd 7y ago
    SF is ridiculously non-dense. Paris, which most people think of as a much nicer city than SF, is much more dense, despite being limited to ~5 stories for most of it.
- eecsninja 7y ago
  "Tech bro" describes a few people at the top (think Adam Neumann or Travis Kalanick) known for their bad behavior but unfortunately is used by the media to paint the rest of the men in tech with the same negative light. The irony is that these people don't have a strong technical role -- they are mostly founders and executives. It's the people working under them with less influence who are doing all the hands-on tech work.
majos 7y ago
Somebody help me understand the appeal of the bay area. What is the relative weight of 1. proximity to other tech companies (good for employees switching jobs) 2. proximity to venture capital (good for entrepreneurs) 3. general culture of tech work 4. general culture, food, weather? 4 seems to pale in comparison to the cost and quality of life issues I have read about (super expensive, dirty, bad transport). 2 seems plausible. But are in-person meetings so necessary and hard to set up outside the area (also, how many people there just want to be employees somewhere and don’t care about VCs?). 3 is pretty nebulous. And again I wouldn’t expect this to be a big factor for people who mostly just want to work somewhere and not build their own thing. I’m left with 1. Is that it? It just seems weird that company location appears optimized for founders (we should go where the action and investment money and talent is!) and not the enormous mass of people who would just be clocking into their jobs and making those companies run. I have no data on this, but it looks like those masses of lower-level employees might prefer to live somewhere more “sensible”. It looks like such an...inefficiency.
- mwilcox 7y ago
  dating probably
  - migueltyson 7y ago
    Dating in SF is not great for dudes.
    - hadiz 7y ago
      Hmm, I think if you're good/bad at dating, you'd be like that anywhere. As in, big cities generally aren't great in dating for dudes.
      - ericd 7y ago
        IIRC someone did a study that concluded that there's a large single-person gender imbalance, way more single guys than ladies in SF, and the opposite imbalance in NYC. Unsure if it's credible.
_bxg1 7y ago
If Jackson, Mississippi is in 1985, I worry that Austin, Texas is in 2010. Slowly, and in miniature, the signals are starting to crop up. Homelessness downtown has visibly increased in just the past 3 years. Historic holes-in-the-wall are dropping like flies. Plenty of new housing is going up, but it's all luxury apartments with ground-floor shopping. The city's culture that everyone moved here for is being thrown out with the bath water. It's tough to watch.
SCAQTony 7y ago
San Francisco has been a boom/bust town since the gold rush. San Francisco's economic focal point, which has lasted there for a century or so, is tourism. Have you heard about that sinking luxury condo skyscraper in S.F.? The terrain is formable in San Francisco, the geographic location treacherous. San Francisco's urban plan does not work well enough to fit nearly a million people. NYC has less than half the square mile footage, yet double the population. NYC works primarily better mainly because of location and geography. "...It turns out that Manhattan has a bedrock unusually suited to the construction of very tall buildings, in many cases just a few meters below the surface." https://observer.com/2012/01/uncanny-valley-the-real-reason-there-are-no-skyscrapers-in-the-middle-of-manhattan/ https://observer.com/2012/01/uncanny-valley-the-real-reason-...
- ericd 7y ago
  Thing is, it doesn't need to be skyscrapers to house vastly more people than it does, it just needs to be 5 story walkups. And SV is currently one long stretch of strip malls, open air parking lots, and single story ranch homes with sad little yards.
  - acslater00 7y ago
    > and single story ranch homes with sad little yards This is so spot-on it literally pains me
  - pasttense01 7y ago
    5 story WALKUPS? Very few are going to walk up that many flights of stairs.
    - sfjailbird 7y ago
      Ever been to a European capital? They consist almost entirely of that type of buildings.
      - desert_boi 7y ago
hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
I'm kind of disappointed in most of the comments here, because I think most of them are so focused on pushing back against the "tech bro" characterization (and TBH I think pushing back against this characterization is totally fair), that they're missing the broader picture of "Hey, things have become kind of fucked up in our largest cities", and it's worth thinking about how to deal with that. What do I mean by fucked up? I mean that the cost of living and housing has become so high that the broad cross section of people you need to produce a vibrant city (e.g. bankers, politicians, techies, policemen, teachers, fireman, waiters, paramedics, artists, etc.) can no longer all afford to live there, and this is a real, serious problem. Cities have always had rich areas and poor areas, but as inequality has grown over the past few decades, with wealth flowing out of rural areas and into urban ones (especially "supercities" like SF, NYC, Seattle, etc.), it means that these cities are having less and less room for anyone but the rich. SF is just the most acute example because (a) the concentrated tech boom here has created enormous amounts of wealth and (b) the geography here more tightly constrains sprawl compared to most other cities. However, the same exact thing is happening in lots of other places. E.g. there used to be "good parts" and "bad parts" (Hell's Kitchen, Alphabet City) of Manhattan, but there are almost no cheap places in Manhattan anymore. Similarly, Austin TX was a "slacker's paradise" 30 years ago, now pretty much all central housing is looking at $300-400k or more just for lot value of a single family home. I'm not sure what the answer is, but I think it's worth talking about how something feels broken in our cities, and what viable solutions would be, instead of just focusing on the "anti-anti-tech-bro" angle.
- smadge 7y ago
  Totally agree that many comments here indicate a deep misreading of the article. The article examined two viewpoints, one that scapegoats the tech industry and one that scapegoats the NIMBYs. They say no progress has been made in a decade as these two viewpoints are in a stalemate. Ironically the author seems to see hope and a way forward in initiatives by the technology industry itself. Maybe everyone here only read the passages that presented the point of view that was critical of the tech industry and not the parts that were critical of the NIMBYs, or the parts that praised the YIMBYs and the tech industry getting involved in a solution.
- 7y ago
seibelj 7y ago
Sad the author can’t be a dictator and make the world exactly as they determined it should be, as that sounds like their true passion, other than injecting smug into their veins every few hours. What an awful, meaningless article.

65 points by smadge 7y ago

For anyone that hasn't seen it, _Cities Without Suburbs_ is a book that lays out the case that fragmentation and infighting are a major hindrance on American metro areas. San Francisco is bounded on all sides from expanding, so it's partially at the mercy of its suburbs when it comes to things like housing. Has there ever been a movement to consolidate the Bay Area like how Nashville consolidated 14(?) counties with the city itself?

x3n0ph3n3 7y ago
Given how poorly San Francisco is run and how corrupt its politics are, I don't think anyone outside of San Francisco would want that.
- CoolGuySteve 7y ago
  Silicon Valley could at least consolidate. I used to live on the border of Cupertino and Sunnyvale. The sales tax was different depending on which side of Homestead Rd I was on. What was the fucking point of that? Were the culture and values of Sunnyvale really that antithetical to those of Cupertino? It would be really nice if one of these parking lot hamlets actually did act differently and zone themselves to be super dense but when I left councilors were still mostly arguing about public WiFi and paying millions to water those plants in the road dividers all summer long.
  - masonic 7y ago
    ...on the border of Cupertino and Sunnyvale. The sales tax was different depending on which side of Homestead No, that's never been the case. Neither Sunnyvale nor Cupertino has a city sales tax.
    - masonic 7y ago
      Um, downvoters, it's the truth. City-specific sales tax is rare in CA; generally, parcel taxes, bonds, etc. are pursued instead.
      - x3n0ph3n3 7y ago
        He's probably confusing his cities. Santa Clara has a 0.25% city sales tax, among other cities in the county: https://www.salestaxhandbook.com/california/rates/santa-clara-county https://www.salestaxhandbook.com/california/rates/santa-clar... San Mateo county also has a few cities with their own sales tax: https://www.salestaxhandbook.com/california/rates/san-mateo-county https://www.salestaxhandbook.com/california/rates/san-mateo-...
wbl 7y ago
San Francisco added 13 jobs for every home over the past decade, making it by far the worst housing actor. The suburbs of SF are the whole western half of the city.
Apocryphon 7y ago
That's what happened to San Jose in the '50s-'60s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._P._Hamann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._P._Hamann

allovernow 7y ago

> Hordes of newly minted and newly wealthy tech bros, flush with Silicon Valley VC cash, ruined what once had been an all-are-welcome cool, gray city of love, where the funky landlady Anna This article nicely represents the narccisistic hubris of the ivory tower leftist viewpoint, and in-group social behavior at large. Tech Bros are the nerds that were (and still are, despite shallow appropriations of nerd culture in the mainstream) cast off from "normal" society. This has been the norm in the U.S. for decades. It's not cool to be smart and have geeky interests. Now tech is hot and the in-group is having trouble competing with people for whom this wasn't just a job or a class, or even a hobby, it was an escape. So they go after their characters to justify quotas and the now deliberate social stigma they were previously oblivious to enforcing. Tech Bros is a dirty class stereotype which totally ignores the passion and skill of the people who are revolutionizing society, for better or worse. And at the end of the day it's just the weird nerd kids being bullied as always. There's an obscure blog by a guy who talks about the three or so stages of popular subcultures, and how one of the three groups eventualy ruin everything, linked in the comments below which is related.

majos 7y ago
> There's an obscure blog by a guy who talks about the three or so stages of popular trends, and how three groups of people interact to eventually ruin any nice thing. If anyone knows that I'm talking about I'd appreciate a link! https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
dehrmann 7y ago
Honest question: are tech bros bros who upped their tech game or nerds who got bro game?
- mc32 7y ago
  It’s an epithet conjured up by journalists plugging in to the angst created by city policies and cast onto a ready and easy target.
  - 7y ago

pascalxus 7y ago

The decision of the Mayor back in 2012 to attract a bunch of Tech companies to the city that wanted growth the LEAST, is highly questionable. It's just such a contradiction of what the locals wanted. And, now we're paying the price, litteraly. In SF, I used to think the answer was to build more housing, lots more. But, after hearing from sooooo many NIMBYs and so much extreme angst against any kind of growth, I've come to realize that SF doesn't deserve tech companies or any companies for that matter. It's time to accept what the locals want and start acting like it. Remove the incentives for companies in SF and start applying disentives. Tech needs a new home, a new city, perhaps one that hasn't been built yet. Perhaps one where innovation will be welcomed instead of stifled. One, where inclusiveness is all encompassing (and applies to housing) and not just a catchphrase used to be politically correct. One that isn't covered in poop. A city where enough housing supply can be built for everyone.

dehrmann 7y ago
> The decision of the Mayor back in 2012 to attract a bunch of Tech companies to the city Do you mean the tax break for companies in the mid-market area, aka the Twitter tax break? There's definitely some tech around there, but I think SoMa has a lot more. The big ones, Google, Facebook, and Salesforce, aren't there.
Gunax 7y ago
The USA is such a vast country, there are so many nice areas. We don't need to cram all of one industry into a single city. I vote Denver, Seattle, or Pittsburgh.
- Apocryphon 7y ago
  As far as animosity towards tech workers and rising housing costs go, Seattle is second only to San Francisco and Austin.
- boring_twenties 7y ago
  Denver and Seattle are both already having extreme housing shortages, congestion, and in the case of Seattle an anti-tech backlash.

thatsenough 7y ago

What made San Francisco what it is today? It's not the soft-on-crime District Attorney who cleared out the prisons by releasing criminals back onto the street. Not the soft-on-crime SFPD, who barely enforces the law because what's the point? The DA won't prosecute anyway. Not the fact that the hippies grew up and moved to Marin, and marijuana and mushrooms have been replaced with fentanyl and methamphetamine. It's certainly not the bustling drug market that operates in 24 hours a day without police interference in the Tenderloin around Hyde and Golden Gate, making the city a go-to destination for drug addicts from across the region. It's not the hundreds of millions of dollars the city hands out each year to homelessness advocacy groups that have no accountability and deliver no results. It's not the entrenched NIMBYs who fight housing development tooth and nail. It's the tech bros.

um_ya 7y ago
It's hard to change others, but it's easy to change yourself. It's easier to just move to a more conservative state or a more welcoming city with less taxes and less restrictions. I appreciate those that choose to stay and fight, but sometimes it's better just to move on. San Francisco has been getting worse.
- fredsanford 7y ago
  >> San Francisco has been getting worse. From my first visit there in ~'93 to my last in ~'99 SF felt like it was going downhill quickly. I would not have gone back voluntarily after the first visit if not for job requirements. I had an uncle who lived in Hayward who complained about both areas a lot. After reading the news about needles, mental patients, shitting in the street etc... I dunno how it could get worse.
- someguydave 7y ago
  Yes but if you move to a more conservative state please leave your extreme left wing politics behind.
smadge 7y ago
I think the article was more nuanced than that.

baron816 7y ago

The vilification of the “tech bro” is really such a tragedy (I know, preaching to the choir here). We’re just people, trying to make a living for ourselves, and doing the things we enjoy. Our culture is no better than anyone else’s. But neither is that of those lived in the Bay Area for the previous decades. Why should we be denied the life we were meant to live because they were here first and they don’t have room for us? There’s plenty of room for everyone to coexist, if we make it.

Apocryphon 7y ago
But that's the thing- there isn't plenty of room, both in terms of affordable housing, and in actual housing (SF is 49 sq. miles hemmed in by the sea). And as our industry gets more entrenched, we are creating that which is directly in contravention of one of our craft's most important axioms: a monoculture.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- wbl 7y ago
  49 square miles used improperly. We could house millions with the ancient technology of the apartment building.
- ericd 7y ago
  SF is ridiculously non-dense. Paris, which most people think of as a much nicer city than SF, is much more dense, despite being limited to ~5 stories for most of it.
eecsninja 7y ago
"Tech bro" describes a few people at the top (think Adam Neumann or Travis Kalanick) known for their bad behavior but unfortunately is used by the media to paint the rest of the men in tech with the same negative light. The irony is that these people don't have a strong technical role -- they are mostly founders and executives. It's the people working under them with less influence who are doing all the hands-on tech work.

majos 7y ago

Somebody help me understand the appeal of the bay area. What is the relative weight of 1. proximity to other tech companies (good for employees switching jobs) 2. proximity to venture capital (good for entrepreneurs) 3. general culture of tech work 4. general culture, food, weather? 4 seems to pale in comparison to the cost and quality of life issues I have read about (super expensive, dirty, bad transport). 2 seems plausible. But are in-person meetings so necessary and hard to set up outside the area (also, how many people there just want to be employees somewhere and don’t care about VCs?). 3 is pretty nebulous. And again I wouldn’t expect this to be a big factor for people who mostly just want to work somewhere and not build their own thing. I’m left with 1. Is that it? It just seems weird that company location appears optimized for founders (we should go where the action and investment money and talent is!) and not the enormous mass of people who would just be clocking into their jobs and making those companies run. I have no data on this, but it looks like those masses of lower-level employees might prefer to live somewhere more “sensible”. It looks like such an...inefficiency.

mwilcox 7y ago
dating probably
- migueltyson 7y ago
  Dating in SF is not great for dudes.
  - hadiz 7y ago
    Hmm, I think if you're good/bad at dating, you'd be like that anywhere. As in, big cities generally aren't great in dating for dudes.
    - ericd 7y ago
      IIRC someone did a study that concluded that there's a large single-person gender imbalance, way more single guys than ladies in SF, and the opposite imbalance in NYC. Unsure if it's credible.

_bxg1 7y ago

If Jackson, Mississippi is in 1985, I worry that Austin, Texas is in 2010. Slowly, and in miniature, the signals are starting to crop up. Homelessness downtown has visibly increased in just the past 3 years. Historic holes-in-the-wall are dropping like flies. Plenty of new housing is going up, but it's all luxury apartments with ground-floor shopping. The city's culture that everyone moved here for is being thrown out with the bath water. It's tough to watch.

SCAQTony 7y ago

San Francisco has been a boom/bust town since the gold rush. San Francisco's economic focal point, which has lasted there for a century or so, is tourism. Have you heard about that sinking luxury condo skyscraper in S.F.? The terrain is formable in San Francisco, the geographic location treacherous. San Francisco's urban plan does not work well enough to fit nearly a million people. NYC has less than half the square mile footage, yet double the population. NYC works primarily better mainly because of location and geography. "...It turns out that Manhattan has a bedrock unusually suited to the construction of very tall buildings, in many cases just a few meters below the surface." https://observer.com/2012/01/uncanny-valley-the-real-reason-there-are-no-skyscrapers-in-the-middle-of-manhattan/ https://observer.com/2012/01/uncanny-valley-the-real-reason-...

ericd 7y ago
Thing is, it doesn't need to be skyscrapers to house vastly more people than it does, it just needs to be 5 story walkups. And SV is currently one long stretch of strip malls, open air parking lots, and single story ranch homes with sad little yards.
- acslater00 7y ago
  > and single story ranch homes with sad little yards This is so spot-on it literally pains me
- pasttense01 7y ago
  5 story WALKUPS? Very few are going to walk up that many flights of stairs.
  - sfjailbird 7y ago
    Ever been to a European capital? They consist almost entirely of that type of buildings.
    - desert_boi 7y ago

hn_throwaway_99 7y ago

I'm kind of disappointed in most of the comments here, because I think most of them are so focused on pushing back against the "tech bro" characterization (and TBH I think pushing back against this characterization is totally fair), that they're missing the broader picture of "Hey, things have become kind of fucked up in our largest cities", and it's worth thinking about how to deal with that. What do I mean by fucked up? I mean that the cost of living and housing has become so high that the broad cross section of people you need to produce a vibrant city (e.g. bankers, politicians, techies, policemen, teachers, fireman, waiters, paramedics, artists, etc.) can no longer all afford to live there, and this is a real, serious problem. Cities have always had rich areas and poor areas, but as inequality has grown over the past few decades, with wealth flowing out of rural areas and into urban ones (especially "supercities" like SF, NYC, Seattle, etc.), it means that these cities are having less and less room for anyone but the rich. SF is just the most acute example because (a) the concentrated tech boom here has created enormous amounts of wealth and (b) the geography here more tightly constrains sprawl compared to most other cities. However, the same exact thing is happening in lots of other places. E.g. there used to be "good parts" and "bad parts" (Hell's Kitchen, Alphabet City) of Manhattan, but there are almost no cheap places in Manhattan anymore. Similarly, Austin TX was a "slacker's paradise" 30 years ago, now pretty much all central housing is looking at $300-400k or more just for lot value of a single family home. I'm not sure what the answer is, but I think it's worth talking about how something feels broken in our cities, and what viable solutions would be, instead of just focusing on the "anti-anti-tech-bro" angle.

smadge 7y ago
Totally agree that many comments here indicate a deep misreading of the article. The article examined two viewpoints, one that scapegoats the tech industry and one that scapegoats the NIMBYs. They say no progress has been made in a decade as these two viewpoints are in a stalemate. Ironically the author seems to see hope and a way forward in initiatives by the technology industry itself. Maybe everyone here only read the passages that presented the point of view that was critical of the tech industry and not the parts that were critical of the NIMBYs, or the parts that praised the YIMBYs and the tech industry getting involved in a solution.
7y ago

seibelj 7y ago

Sad the author can’t be a dictator and make the world exactly as they determined it should be, as that sounds like their true passion, other than injecting smug into their veins every few hours. What an awful, meaningless article.