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I live in a Bay Area suburb with mostly single family homes. One would think that people would form communities but you would be surprised. Many of the newer te

by babesh 6y ago

I live in a Bay Area suburb with mostly single family homes. One would think that people would form communities but you would be surprised. Many of the newer tech people just treat it as a bedroom whereas some parents and older residents treat it as a community. I think much of new tech is mercenary. They aren’t from the area. They came to make money. They don’t care about the neighborhood. When they can make more money elsewhere they will leave. In fact, with COVID-19, many have and are. Even if you build a bunch of tech fish tanks, the surrounding area will still become very expensive. Yes, building more tech fish tanks can make it less worse, but it is still be untenable for existing residents. An artisanal coffee shop replacing a donut shop just made coffee unaffordable for the less wealthy. I think that a much better connected transit system is actually the answer. It will allow new communities to form farther off but still connected to the whole. It gives everyone a place at the table and increases the cultural richness. NYC feels much more culturally rich than SF and I think that is why. Instead, in the Bay Area, you had the black community moving to Sacramento. Also, those fishtanks were folly. It would have been much better for the city to have more mixed housing in those neighborhoods. By mixed, I mean having some larger units that allow families to stay. In a way, in the SOMA, you replaced the original SROs with tech SROs. The irony. I think the transit villages were also terribly designed. Most are aligned around the track. That makes no sense from a noise pollution standpoint. It makes far more sense to build either perpendicular to the track or at least a block away. Stepping back even further, government had and has an issue with attracting talent. It was hopelessly inadequate at addressing the challenges and taking advantage of the opportunities.

almost_usual 6y ago
> I think much of new tech is mercenary. They aren’t from the area. They came to make money. They don’t care about the neighborhood. When they can make more money elsewhere they will leave. In fact, with COVID-19, many have and are. That’s literally the history of SF and why the city even began existing. The ‘attitude’ isn’t anything new, SF is built on gold mining and get rich opportunities.
- babesh 6y ago
  Yes agree. That attitude is definitely part of the history of SF and it didn’t occur just once.
imtringued 6y ago
>When they can make more money elsewhere they will leave. Why is your local government putting so much effort into making it a tech fish trap? Yeah they will leave but only when your ability to trap them is gone. That's on you and your city. Stop blaming victims of your trap.
- babesh 6y ago
  You just made an unwarranted assumption that I live in a suburb that is trying to make itself a tech fish trap. That isn’t the case at all and shows your bias. The suburb I live in has few tech jobs. In fact it has relatively few jobs at all. Most revenue comes from property taxes. Furthermore, it has shown no interest in attracting tech jobs. It doesn’t even have many fish traps. I think it has two such fish traps for perhaps 50-100 people out of a total population approaching 27000. It seems to be attracting people due to geography, quality of life, and relatively good schools. The number of children has gone up something like 70% in the last 10 years. It was also rated a top 10 small town/city in the US.
pas 6y ago
Why are tech workers, who just want a bedroom live in suburbs, why not in a denser area? It seems there is no cheap bedroom close to where they work? Or it's historical that Big Tech has offices in suburbs. Because the US is a big suburb with a few downtowns for skyscrapers for Fortune 500 cover photos? ... Transit, mixed-use, etc. would all help. But there are probably 50+ years of emergent (and not so emergent, like Bob Moses and the car lobby putting a highway up everyone's ass) problems that need addressing.
- babesh 6y ago
  Big tech is actually still mostly in the suburbs. By big tech we mean Facebook, Google, Apple, Netflix, etc... It is only the newer generation of companies that are HQ’d in SF. The older generation employs far more workers and are still a lot bigger. Facebook’s HQ is Menlo Park (suburb). Google’s is in Mountain View (suburb). Apple’s is in Cupertino (suburb). Netflix’s is in Los Gatos (suburb). The only big city downtown is actually SF. I would characterize San Jose as a giant suburb. All the other so called cities are really suburbs. Oakland has a small downtown but is across the Bay and has virtually no tech scene. Particular kinds of tech tend to cluster together typically due to a founding company. South Bay is where hardware companies cluster. Enterprise software tends to cluster around Oracle in the mid Peninsula area. New software companies now cluster mostly around SF. I think the people who found new companies want access to the existing labor pool so they found the companies close to similar existing companies. If you work for FB in Menlo Park, you probably don’t want to commute down from SF. You would waste a lot of your time doing so. You also probably prefer to live in a nicer place than a fish tank. So if you can find a nicer place than a fish tank and that is still close to work, then you would jump at it. Even if you prefer fish tank style, most of the fish tanks aren’t actually that nice: 600 sq ft and a view of your neighbor’s balcony. 600 sq ft is kind of small once you get married. Also, $3400 sounds better going to a mortgage than an apartment if housing prices appreciate. You can always sell.
  - pas 6y ago
    That's my point. US cities were/are/have-became so bad, due to the peculiar circumstances since WWII (insanely strong economic growth and real wage growth, cold war anti-communism paranoia, car lobby, american dream, redlining/segregation/white-flight/SouthernStrategy), that most US cities didn't/couldn't function as engines of industry. The US economy is subsidizing a "one car, one parking place, one hour commute policy", every new company, new job, new office in the suburbs. (And shuttle buses for Google, etc.) Instead of building better cities.

by babesh 6y ago

almost_usual 6y ago

> I think much of new tech is mercenary. They aren’t from the area. They came to make money. They don’t care about the neighborhood. When they can make more money elsewhere they will leave. In fact, with COVID-19, many have and are. That’s literally the history of SF and why the city even began existing. The ‘attitude’ isn’t anything new, SF is built on gold mining and get rich opportunities.

babesh 6y ago
Yes agree. That attitude is definitely part of the history of SF and it didn’t occur just once.

imtringued 6y ago

>When they can make more money elsewhere they will leave. Why is your local government putting so much effort into making it a tech fish trap? Yeah they will leave but only when your ability to trap them is gone. That's on you and your city. Stop blaming victims of your trap.

babesh 6y ago
You just made an unwarranted assumption that I live in a suburb that is trying to make itself a tech fish trap. That isn’t the case at all and shows your bias. The suburb I live in has few tech jobs. In fact it has relatively few jobs at all. Most revenue comes from property taxes. Furthermore, it has shown no interest in attracting tech jobs. It doesn’t even have many fish traps. I think it has two such fish traps for perhaps 50-100 people out of a total population approaching 27000. It seems to be attracting people due to geography, quality of life, and relatively good schools. The number of children has gone up something like 70% in the last 10 years. It was also rated a top 10 small town/city in the US.

pas 6y ago

Why are tech workers, who just want a bedroom live in suburbs, why not in a denser area? It seems there is no cheap bedroom close to where they work? Or it's historical that Big Tech has offices in suburbs. Because the US is a big suburb with a few downtowns for skyscrapers for Fortune 500 cover photos? ... Transit, mixed-use, etc. would all help. But there are probably 50+ years of emergent (and not so emergent, like Bob Moses and the car lobby putting a highway up everyone's ass) problems that need addressing.

babesh 6y ago
Big tech is actually still mostly in the suburbs. By big tech we mean Facebook, Google, Apple, Netflix, etc... It is only the newer generation of companies that are HQ’d in SF. The older generation employs far more workers and are still a lot bigger. Facebook’s HQ is Menlo Park (suburb). Google’s is in Mountain View (suburb). Apple’s is in Cupertino (suburb). Netflix’s is in Los Gatos (suburb). The only big city downtown is actually SF. I would characterize San Jose as a giant suburb. All the other so called cities are really suburbs. Oakland has a small downtown but is across the Bay and has virtually no tech scene. Particular kinds of tech tend to cluster together typically due to a founding company. South Bay is where hardware companies cluster. Enterprise software tends to cluster around Oracle in the mid Peninsula area. New software companies now cluster mostly around SF. I think the people who found new companies want access to the existing labor pool so they found the companies close to similar existing companies. If you work for FB in Menlo Park, you probably don’t want to commute down from SF. You would waste a lot of your time doing so. You also probably prefer to live in a nicer place than a fish tank. So if you can find a nicer place than a fish tank and that is still close to work, then you would jump at it. Even if you prefer fish tank style, most of the fish tanks aren’t actually that nice: 600 sq ft and a view of your neighbor’s balcony. 600 sq ft is kind of small once you get married. Also, $3400 sounds better going to a mortgage than an apartment if housing prices appreciate. You can always sell.
- pas 6y ago
  That's my point. US cities were/are/have-became so bad, due to the peculiar circumstances since WWII (insanely strong economic growth and real wage growth, cold war anti-communism paranoia, car lobby, american dream, redlining/segregation/white-flight/SouthernStrategy), that most US cities didn't/couldn't function as engines of industry. The US economy is subsidizing a "one car, one parking place, one hour commute policy", every new company, new job, new office in the suburbs. (And shuttle buses for Google, etc.) Instead of building better cities.