11 ms·

Tech booms fuelled liveability busts in Silicon Valley and Bengaluru

101 points by venkatananth 4y ago

Brajeshwar 4y ago
Wow! I had been to a few of the offices in the place mentioned in the article and in 2018 I had to visit the home (a Villa inside APR) of a potential big customer. As I drove in with my co-founder through the checks and meandered toward the Villa, the first thing that escaped from my lips were, “Did we just landed somewhere in California?” It looked extremely close to the place of my long-time late business partner's home in South Pasadena -- kid's bike on the patio, manicured lawns, garages with seagull cars parked. Of course, there are the usual well-boxed apartment complex within the massive compound but these Villas are the epitome of a self-contained bubble in Bangalore. The entrance to the place from the main road is even not easy to navigate for first-timers. However, the biggest dread now in Bangalore is stepping out of our home or the complexes. Many of the roads remind me of final destination every time I drove out. Disclosure: I'm also hiding in another community where my neighbors are the founders, and similar suites in many Indian Startups, including quite a few expats transplanted by Indian Company acquisitions of International Companies. And yes, the Third Wave co-founder is one and I got his home-made coffee during the Pandemic delivered at my doorstep (cool guy). Also, I find that the term "Third-Wave Coffee" and "Peak Bengaluru" always tend to go hand-in-hand. ;-)
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  Bengaluru’s unlivability is entirely due to the failure of the public administration and widespread corruption. There is no public transport. The metro that was supposed to be completed years ago is in a perpetual state of delay. The roads are always dug up for some random construction project that never gets done on time. The airport is a source of woe for everyone since its at least an hour away from all offices and residential areas. The only reason it was made so far from the main city is because politicians owned a lot of land in that area and wanted to appreciate its value. Bengaluru will continue to remain unlivable because India’s educated technocrat class is too tiny to have any real say in the state or even the city’s politics. At least the weather is nice and crime isn’t all that bad. Delhi can’t even boast of that.
  - saimiam 4y ago
    > educated technocrat class is too tiny We (the Indian technocrat cohort) need to get into politics.
    - baybal2 4y ago
      I would object, The Indian technocrat cohort is giant, and makes most of high grade ICS officials. Tons of engineers there, an irrefutable fact. On other hand, I would say civil service in India is horrifically elitist, and values degrees, over competency, and real experience.
      - spaceman_2020 4y ago
        It always boggles my mind how much bureaucrats are venerated in India. IAS/IPS officers become legit celebrities. Part of my bear thesis on India is that no country can progress that venerates the bureaucracy.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        kamaal 4y ago
        Civil services, even state civil services were designed from the perspective that they would defacto govern the country. Which is actually a fact. No politician can hold a candle to civil services cadre in a country like India. Even before India got independence, the fact that most of India was unlettered and even with a democracy cannot make informed decisions was fairly obvious. This is apart from the fact that most elected representatives themselves cannot read/write, and even if they can they have little idea about how to run things. Even the good ones take a while to get a hang of things, and are not really trained to make policy decisions. Given most elected representatives are also more like 1 - 2 term politicians, they also can't think long term or anything beyond roads and drinking water. When you have a set up like this you need a dedicated cadre of life long administrators who can defacto govern the country. For all practical purposes civil services are ruling elite of India. They are also treated as such. The only real problem is the process of selection is made to select trivia scholars and people with a knack for theatricality than real competence. There is also an assumption that people who make it after such a process will be competent life long. Both the process and assumptions are wrong. The sheer small size(4500 people) of civil services cadres, far reaching powers, lack of accountability, assumption of static/growing competence, there is no concept of continuous learning or training. This creates a problem of scarcity. By that comes privilege, corruption, autocratic behaviour etc. Eventually these are like mini rulers of India. This is a big reason why even in corporate sectors everybody wants to be managers, there is an assumption that these management/administration jobs have no work, and unlimited power and perks. India's culture makes it look like a failure to work regular engineering jobs where you build things, take a salary and go home.
- kwatsonafter 4y ago
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Brajeshwar 4y ago
    Ah! You forgot to mention why you have that opinion, Mr. Kishore Krishna Das.
    - kwatsonafter 4y ago
- ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
  You can put all the investment in the world, but you cannot take the mindset of corruption from Indians. Given a chance, on average, they will take the easy way out. The biggest curse of India was Infosys and the "IT boom" which brought in thousands of low level jobs to India, bolstered the economy but killed any innovation in the country. All the thinking and innovation was done in the west and cheap bodies were provided by India. That's why Java was so popular in India. It allows for very little creativity. Leaving India's reputation as a place for cheap, dumb labour with low quality code or scammers. Only recently a tiny subset are trying to break out of this mold.
- kamaal 4y ago
  >>However, the biggest dread now in Bangalore is stepping out of our home or the complexes. Don't wish to make presumption, but please if you stay in those gated communities, I have to say you know nothing about Bangalore. That entire Whitefield/ORR crowd lives in a tailored bubble, everything from their home to kids schooling is kind of tailored to make them comfortable in a cocoon which doesn't apply nearly all of Bangalore.
- zardo 4y ago
  > garages with seagull cars parked. I assume these are not cars driven by seagulls, but I'm not sure what else that phrase could mean.
  - Brajeshwar 4y ago
    Sorry for extremely vague but wanted it that way. The Gull-Wing Cars. Russ Hanneman in Silicon Valley. This should give you an idea https://youtu.be/0oV4IVy8tvE?t=79 https://youtu.be/0oV4IVy8tvE?t=79
immigrantheart 4y ago
Putting my “Game Theory” hat and “Systems Thinking” hat. Given the “Law of Induced Demand”, can anyone here explain to me why cheap housing is possible? I would think that all these systems (as in, systems thinking) are functioning the way it supposed to be. Overpopulation will eventually result in population decline. Because it is too expensive, not enough space/resource, everyone wants the same location, jobs, etc. System oscillates.
- ramraj07 4y ago
  Because SV and Vancouver housing shortage is exacerbated by NIMBY zoning crap restricted by politics outside of your so-called capitalistic forces. Even if the system works as you say it would, is the outrageous human cost it entails just a detail for you? We are not trading transistors or currency notes, we are trading people. “Pricing a demographic out” means dislocating vulnerable families again and again as they desperately try to sustain and make an honest living. If we can devise a better system than this abattoir you describe, we owe it to any existing conscience to try and implement it. It’s only natural to feel like the system is working because you’ve been successful. It takes a better person than natural to think beyond how things have worked for them and try to think of the whole system and it’s participants.
  - immigrantheart 4y ago
    When I mentioned “system is working” I mean system as in systems thinking. I edit my post to clarify. Please refer to that. I don’t live in SF or Bangalore. I also don’t own a property. I’m interested in this discussion, as I say, from Game Theory and Systems Thinking perspective. Lets refer to that.
    - ramraj07 4y ago
      I still gave my answer nonetheless. Capitalism and related “systems” don’t always (or ever?) work perfectly in human society. Because human nature is unnatural, driven by greed/emotions and illogical. See this great article explaining it in an engineering company sense: https://danluu.com/nothing-works/ https://danluu.com/nothing-works/
baybal2 4y ago
Americans are prone to "projection," not learning, but using their closest experiences to explain new things, even when most obvious rational explanation stands against it. "Everything must be like in America." I have tons of Indian friends, and spent months on assignments in South Asia. There is absolutely no contest to the idea that IT been overwhelmingly, massively beneficial for South India, far exceeding all maladies. Anybody coming with an idea like "lets bulldoze Bengaluru because hipsters say so," or punitively tax IT will be skinned alive there. Anti-development agenda does resonate within the country at all sans few communist holdout areas. It is universally outside party discourse, nationalists are for the IT, congress are for IT, even communists are for IT lately, and whomever says otherwise will be voted out faster that you can blink. Similarly, people pooing on manufacturing relocating to South Asia have zero idea how damn glad people are for new factories coming there. Valley hipsters coming to "save oppressed workers" are surprised when the same workers, and union leaders come to violently lash out at them.
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  None of this is antithetical to simple ideas of creating better public transport, public spaces, and more affordable housing.
  - baybal2 4y ago
- Ekaros 4y ago
  Bringing outside money into somewhat impoverished area is massively beneficial for it area. It might have some negative externalities. But on average it is likely to improve everyone's living conditions. Economic activity is what drives development. Give it a few decades and the once expensive will be affordable for average people. On other hand overheating a existing developed market might not be so great for anyone but early investors moving out from the market.
- yunohn 4y ago
  > punitively tax IT will be skinned alive there. If anything, IT (software) employees are the most diligent white-collar taxpayers. They have no option and are paying an outsized share if you ask me. What gives you the idea that the average IT worker needs to be taxed even more?
5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
is there such thing as peak "unliveability". where a place becomes a hellish nightmare for all but the 1%. or does the gap get wider forever and we are heading toward some kind of real dystopia. i mean what eventually happens to over-saturated markets, be it housing, jobs or whatever else. when demand vs supply reaches peak disequilibrium (cant think of a better word..)
- Enginerrrd 4y ago
  This is an interesting question, one I've pondered for a while. This is speculation, but here's what I believe: Let's assume wealth follows a Pareto distribution, with the single parameter alpha determining the shape of that curve, and thus the resulting income inequality. I think that growth of real economic output / GDP probably has a maximum for some alpha, above which, increased inequality slows down growth. I suspect it also declines BELOW a certain alpha since it offers fewer people with extreme capital to the market capable of making moonshots. However, that doesn't mean growth stops, and I suspect the people high on the curve have little incentive to change. I'm not sure though. Is it better to have ownership of X percent of wealth, and greater relative wealth, or X-e percent of wealth, less relative wealth but more growth? Now... ostensibly, I don't think there's likely to be a 'peak'. It would defy the assumptions of a market. If housing prices rise so high there aren't enough buyers, prices would fall. However... famously, certain billionaires have been known to buy up all the houses around theirs at exorbitant prices to enhance privacy. So I suppose you could still see vacant housing, but no fall in prices. That said, in general, quality of life would decline for lots of people. We'd see a lot more roommates and extended family groups living together to make it affordable. People in US cities used to do that a lot actually, and we might see a return to that. There has historically been a floor though, where below that, things are so bad that people don't have much to lose by taking up arms, dragging rich people into the street and cutting their heads off. Another angle in modern times is that we are seeing such a precipitous drop in birth rates in the West, that I suspect we'll start to see countries compete for people interested in having children by creating financial incentives and friendlier conditions to do so.
  - lumost 4y ago
newaccount2021 4y ago
georgeburdell 4y ago
As a non-Indian, what does this mean? “Sunnyvale is an apt name for a city in the heart of Silicon Valley, at the southern end of the San Francisco Bay Area, where the sky is always blue and largely cloudless. The burgeoning population of Indian techies has earned the city its new moniker ‘Sooraj Nagari’, much the way neighbouring Mountain View—home to Google’s global headquarters—goes by the name ‘Pahar Ganj’.” Also, uh what? The 1960s were dominated by hippies, which are more like Luddites outside of drug use, if you consider LSD “technology”. The 1950s and the early Space Age much more align with a tech utopian vision “Silicon Valley owes its ideals of technological utopianism to the culture of the 1960s–a heady belief that tech is inherently a force for good in the world. “
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
  Many of the early tech pioneers in SV were hippies, who sought utopia via information sharing, which meant computers accessible by all.
  - edgyquant 4y ago
    No they weren’t most were military contractors until 70s. This is a romanticized notion based on a few famous individuals.
  - georgeburdell 4y ago
    What is early, and who besides Steve Jobs (who I would not consider an early silicon valley pioneer anyway) fits that mold? Most were straight-laced tie-wearing scientist-engineer types until the dotcom era.
    - tauwauwau 4y ago
      Richard Stallman still looks like one to me :), I know its from late Internet era, but see following https://youtu.be/4Q7FTjhvZ7Y?t=705 https://youtu.be/4Q7FTjhvZ7Y?t=705
      - 4y ago
kwatsonafter 4y ago
...and then this happens. https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/bhopal/madhya-pradesh-fertiliser-crisis-farmer-dies-by-suicide-7597886/ https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/bhopal/madhya-prade...
jelliclesfarm 4y ago
[..]Mohandas Pai, the former Infosys director and poster boy of Bengaluru’s tech boom, feels the rot runs deep. “There’s a high degree of corruption in every wing: roads, governance and garbage,” Pai tells The Intersection. “The government collects taxes from urban areas, but invests them in rural regions.” He nevertheless thinks the city’s un-livability is an exaggeration. Mohandas Pai, the former Infosys director and poster boy of Bengaluru’s tech boom, feels the rot runs deep. “There’s a high degree of corruption in every wing: roads, governance and garbage,” Pai tells The Intersection. “The government collects taxes from urban areas, but invests them in rural regions.” He nevertheless thinks the city’s un-livability is an exaggeration. [..] He hit the nail on the head. This is exactly the same with Bay Area governance. No local govt..everything is regionally governed and distributed statewide.
- xony 4y ago
jelliclesfarm 4y ago
The (elected) Indian city council member of my Bay Area City took others to Bangalore for a show and tell using tax dollars. This trip was later used to defend the high density housing plans. And then there was another trip to Shanghai. (None to Singapore interestingly where high density actually works because the govt is efficient and provides state housing to more than 70% of pop). It was appalling for all immigrants who did come from their over populated high density failed urban centers. In the end, more housing. But our PD has been slashed(more crime now), road diet(more cycle lanes but traffic jams), over crowded schools, higher water and power bills(14hour power disruption yesterday in adjacent neighborhood… Looks like there is a toxic exchange of energy between two corrupt govts that are learning from each other after burping all the tax dollars from the burgeoning tech sector. They have effectively made the tech sector as the villain so the people can fight amongst each other while they can march towards their higher political goals. Many city officials have gone on to state senate. The elected official who organized the Bangalore trip was picked up by one of the FAANG’s billion dollar affordable housing initiatives after their term was over. Hmmm…this feels familiar. Where have I seen this before I moved to the Bay Area?
pts_ 4y ago
Tech's obsession with real estate is oxymoronic and dumb.
w0mbat 4y ago
The article drags in Sunnyvale, where I live, but can’t really find one negative thing to say about it. The population reduction is purely related to COVID WFH leading some people to work from elsewhere, and is temporary. It’s a very nice place to live. Low crime, good schools, great weather, plenty of jobs. Very liveable. This lazy tendency to lump SF in with Silicon Valley is dumb. SF is a peninsula, it’s not in the valley. It has a few niche companies but the huge bulk of the tech industry is down in the valley, which does not have SFs problems.
- andbberger 4y ago
  horrible public transit, low density/poor walkability, little to no bike infrastructure the whole penninsula is like that, it's awful. night and day between the penninsula and SF, which doesn't even rank that highly on the world stage
  - w0mbat 4y ago
    It's very driveable, traffic is fine and parking is easy. Neighborhoods like downtown Mtn View and downtown Sunnyvale (where I live) are very walkable but you don't have to walk. Public transport is not the way to go in the valley, but if you do use it it's much safer than public transport in SF.
    - andbberger 4y ago
      a liveable city, this does not make. and public transport in SF is perfectly safe.
- jfim 4y ago
  High cost of living, the most exciting thing happening in town is the farmer's market, good schools doesn't apply to all of Sunnyvale, lack of diversity, everything that's moderately interesting is closing down (we lost weird stuff warehouse, fry's, etc.), the list goes on and on. It's liveable if one's idea of living is going to their tech job and maybe hiking on the weekends, but otherwise it's really boring.
refurb 4y ago
To me this is how the system is supposed to work. I mean, people moved to LA after WW2 because it had jobs, cheap real estate and nice weather. It doesn't have cheap real estate or great paying jobs (relatively speaking to COL) any more. Detroit's populations was doubling every decade from 1900 to WW2. Go and visit some time and see the opulent housing downtown. It was the place to be in America. Now it's a lot of abandoned houses. I'm not sure why our goal should be "create cheap housing in the Bay Area". The problem will take care of itself as people move elsewhere (it's already happening) and business cycles remove a lot of easy money. We don't really have to do anything. It's a problem that will solve itself.

101 points by venkatananth 4y ago

Wow! I had been to a few of the offices in the place mentioned in the article and in 2018 I had to visit the home (a Villa inside APR) of a potential big customer. As I drove in with my co-founder through the checks and meandered toward the Villa, the first thing that escaped from my lips were, “Did we just landed somewhere in California?” It looked extremely close to the place of my long-time late business partner's home in South Pasadena -- kid's bike on the patio, manicured lawns, garages with seagull cars parked. Of course, there are the usual well-boxed apartment complex within the massive compound but these Villas are the epitome of a self-contained bubble in Bangalore. The entrance to the place from the main road is even not easy to navigate for first-timers. However, the biggest dread now in Bangalore is stepping out of our home or the complexes. Many of the roads remind me of final destination every time I drove out. Disclosure: I'm also hiding in another community where my neighbors are the founders, and similar suites in many Indian Startups, including quite a few expats transplanted by Indian Company acquisitions of International Companies. And yes, the Third Wave co-founder is one and I got his home-made coffee during the Pandemic delivered at my doorstep (cool guy). Also, I find that the term "Third-Wave Coffee" and "Peak Bengaluru" always tend to go hand-in-hand. ;-)

spaceman_2020 4y ago
Bengaluru’s unlivability is entirely due to the failure of the public administration and widespread corruption. There is no public transport. The metro that was supposed to be completed years ago is in a perpetual state of delay. The roads are always dug up for some random construction project that never gets done on time. The airport is a source of woe for everyone since its at least an hour away from all offices and residential areas. The only reason it was made so far from the main city is because politicians owned a lot of land in that area and wanted to appreciate its value. Bengaluru will continue to remain unlivable because India’s educated technocrat class is too tiny to have any real say in the state or even the city’s politics. At least the weather is nice and crime isn’t all that bad. Delhi can’t even boast of that.
- saimiam 4y ago
  > educated technocrat class is too tiny We (the Indian technocrat cohort) need to get into politics.
  - baybal2 4y ago
    I would object, The Indian technocrat cohort is giant, and makes most of high grade ICS officials. Tons of engineers there, an irrefutable fact. On other hand, I would say civil service in India is horrifically elitist, and values degrees, over competency, and real experience.
    - spaceman_2020 4y ago
      It always boggles my mind how much bureaucrats are venerated in India. IAS/IPS officers become legit celebrities. Part of my bear thesis on India is that no country can progress that venerates the bureaucracy.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - kamaal 4y ago
        Civil services, even state civil services were designed from the perspective that they would defacto govern the country. Which is actually a fact. No politician can hold a candle to civil services cadre in a country like India. Even before India got independence, the fact that most of India was unlettered and even with a democracy cannot make informed decisions was fairly obvious. This is apart from the fact that most elected representatives themselves cannot read/write, and even if they can they have little idea about how to run things. Even the good ones take a while to get a hang of things, and are not really trained to make policy decisions. Given most elected representatives are also more like 1 - 2 term politicians, they also can't think long term or anything beyond roads and drinking water. When you have a set up like this you need a dedicated cadre of life long administrators who can defacto govern the country. For all practical purposes civil services are ruling elite of India. They are also treated as such. The only real problem is the process of selection is made to select trivia scholars and people with a knack for theatricality than real competence. There is also an assumption that people who make it after such a process will be competent life long. Both the process and assumptions are wrong. The sheer small size(4500 people) of civil services cadres, far reaching powers, lack of accountability, assumption of static/growing competence, there is no concept of continuous learning or training. This creates a problem of scarcity. By that comes privilege, corruption, autocratic behaviour etc. Eventually these are like mini rulers of India. This is a big reason why even in corporate sectors everybody wants to be managers, there is an assumption that these management/administration jobs have no work, and unlimited power and perks. India's culture makes it look like a failure to work regular engineering jobs where you build things, take a salary and go home.
kwatsonafter 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Brajeshwar 4y ago
  Ah! You forgot to mention why you have that opinion, Mr. Kishore Krishna Das.
  - kwatsonafter 4y ago
ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
You can put all the investment in the world, but you cannot take the mindset of corruption from Indians. Given a chance, on average, they will take the easy way out. The biggest curse of India was Infosys and the "IT boom" which brought in thousands of low level jobs to India, bolstered the economy but killed any innovation in the country. All the thinking and innovation was done in the west and cheap bodies were provided by India. That's why Java was so popular in India. It allows for very little creativity. Leaving India's reputation as a place for cheap, dumb labour with low quality code or scammers. Only recently a tiny subset are trying to break out of this mold.
kamaal 4y ago
>>However, the biggest dread now in Bangalore is stepping out of our home or the complexes. Don't wish to make presumption, but please if you stay in those gated communities, I have to say you know nothing about Bangalore. That entire Whitefield/ORR crowd lives in a tailored bubble, everything from their home to kids schooling is kind of tailored to make them comfortable in a cocoon which doesn't apply nearly all of Bangalore.
zardo 4y ago
> garages with seagull cars parked. I assume these are not cars driven by seagulls, but I'm not sure what else that phrase could mean.
- Brajeshwar 4y ago
  Sorry for extremely vague but wanted it that way. The Gull-Wing Cars. Russ Hanneman in Silicon Valley. This should give you an idea https://youtu.be/0oV4IVy8tvE?t=79 https://youtu.be/0oV4IVy8tvE?t=79

immigrantheart 4y ago

Putting my “Game Theory” hat and “Systems Thinking” hat. Given the “Law of Induced Demand”, can anyone here explain to me why cheap housing is possible? I would think that all these systems (as in, systems thinking) are functioning the way it supposed to be. Overpopulation will eventually result in population decline. Because it is too expensive, not enough space/resource, everyone wants the same location, jobs, etc. System oscillates.

ramraj07 4y ago
Because SV and Vancouver housing shortage is exacerbated by NIMBY zoning crap restricted by politics outside of your so-called capitalistic forces. Even if the system works as you say it would, is the outrageous human cost it entails just a detail for you? We are not trading transistors or currency notes, we are trading people. “Pricing a demographic out” means dislocating vulnerable families again and again as they desperately try to sustain and make an honest living. If we can devise a better system than this abattoir you describe, we owe it to any existing conscience to try and implement it. It’s only natural to feel like the system is working because you’ve been successful. It takes a better person than natural to think beyond how things have worked for them and try to think of the whole system and it’s participants.
- immigrantheart 4y ago
  When I mentioned “system is working” I mean system as in systems thinking. I edit my post to clarify. Please refer to that. I don’t live in SF or Bangalore. I also don’t own a property. I’m interested in this discussion, as I say, from Game Theory and Systems Thinking perspective. Lets refer to that.
  - ramraj07 4y ago
    I still gave my answer nonetheless. Capitalism and related “systems” don’t always (or ever?) work perfectly in human society. Because human nature is unnatural, driven by greed/emotions and illogical. See this great article explaining it in an engineering company sense: https://danluu.com/nothing-works/ https://danluu.com/nothing-works/

baybal2 4y ago

Americans are prone to "projection," not learning, but using their closest experiences to explain new things, even when most obvious rational explanation stands against it. "Everything must be like in America." I have tons of Indian friends, and spent months on assignments in South Asia. There is absolutely no contest to the idea that IT been overwhelmingly, massively beneficial for South India, far exceeding all maladies. Anybody coming with an idea like "lets bulldoze Bengaluru because hipsters say so," or punitively tax IT will be skinned alive there. Anti-development agenda does resonate within the country at all sans few communist holdout areas. It is universally outside party discourse, nationalists are for the IT, congress are for IT, even communists are for IT lately, and whomever says otherwise will be voted out faster that you can blink. Similarly, people pooing on manufacturing relocating to South Asia have zero idea how damn glad people are for new factories coming there. Valley hipsters coming to "save oppressed workers" are surprised when the same workers, and union leaders come to violently lash out at them.

spaceman_2020 4y ago
None of this is antithetical to simple ideas of creating better public transport, public spaces, and more affordable housing.
- baybal2 4y ago
Ekaros 4y ago
Bringing outside money into somewhat impoverished area is massively beneficial for it area. It might have some negative externalities. But on average it is likely to improve everyone's living conditions. Economic activity is what drives development. Give it a few decades and the once expensive will be affordable for average people. On other hand overheating a existing developed market might not be so great for anyone but early investors moving out from the market.
yunohn 4y ago
> punitively tax IT will be skinned alive there. If anything, IT (software) employees are the most diligent white-collar taxpayers. They have no option and are paying an outsized share if you ask me. What gives you the idea that the average IT worker needs to be taxed even more?

5350-uiop-1130 4y ago

is there such thing as peak "unliveability". where a place becomes a hellish nightmare for all but the 1%. or does the gap get wider forever and we are heading toward some kind of real dystopia. i mean what eventually happens to over-saturated markets, be it housing, jobs or whatever else. when demand vs supply reaches peak disequilibrium (cant think of a better word..)

Enginerrrd 4y ago
This is an interesting question, one I've pondered for a while. This is speculation, but here's what I believe: Let's assume wealth follows a Pareto distribution, with the single parameter alpha determining the shape of that curve, and thus the resulting income inequality. I think that growth of real economic output / GDP probably has a maximum for some alpha, above which, increased inequality slows down growth. I suspect it also declines BELOW a certain alpha since it offers fewer people with extreme capital to the market capable of making moonshots. However, that doesn't mean growth stops, and I suspect the people high on the curve have little incentive to change. I'm not sure though. Is it better to have ownership of X percent of wealth, and greater relative wealth, or X-e percent of wealth, less relative wealth but more growth? Now... ostensibly, I don't think there's likely to be a 'peak'. It would defy the assumptions of a market. If housing prices rise so high there aren't enough buyers, prices would fall. However... famously, certain billionaires have been known to buy up all the houses around theirs at exorbitant prices to enhance privacy. So I suppose you could still see vacant housing, but no fall in prices. That said, in general, quality of life would decline for lots of people. We'd see a lot more roommates and extended family groups living together to make it affordable. People in US cities used to do that a lot actually, and we might see a return to that. There has historically been a floor though, where below that, things are so bad that people don't have much to lose by taking up arms, dragging rich people into the street and cutting their heads off. Another angle in modern times is that we are seeing such a precipitous drop in birth rates in the West, that I suspect we'll start to see countries compete for people interested in having children by creating financial incentives and friendlier conditions to do so.
- lumost 4y ago

newaccount2021 4y ago

georgeburdell 4y ago

As a non-Indian, what does this mean? “Sunnyvale is an apt name for a city in the heart of Silicon Valley, at the southern end of the San Francisco Bay Area, where the sky is always blue and largely cloudless. The burgeoning population of Indian techies has earned the city its new moniker ‘Sooraj Nagari’, much the way neighbouring Mountain View—home to Google’s global headquarters—goes by the name ‘Pahar Ganj’.” Also, uh what? The 1960s were dominated by hippies, which are more like Luddites outside of drug use, if you consider LSD “technology”. The 1950s and the early Space Age much more align with a tech utopian vision “Silicon Valley owes its ideals of technological utopianism to the culture of the 1960s–a heady belief that tech is inherently a force for good in the world. “

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
Many of the early tech pioneers in SV were hippies, who sought utopia via information sharing, which meant computers accessible by all.
- edgyquant 4y ago
  No they weren’t most were military contractors until 70s. This is a romanticized notion based on a few famous individuals.
- georgeburdell 4y ago
  What is early, and who besides Steve Jobs (who I would not consider an early silicon valley pioneer anyway) fits that mold? Most were straight-laced tie-wearing scientist-engineer types until the dotcom era.
  - tauwauwau 4y ago
    Richard Stallman still looks like one to me :), I know its from late Internet era, but see following https://youtu.be/4Q7FTjhvZ7Y?t=705 https://youtu.be/4Q7FTjhvZ7Y?t=705
    - 4y ago

kwatsonafter 4y ago

...and then this happens. https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/bhopal/madhya-pradesh-fertiliser-crisis-farmer-dies-by-suicide-7597886/ https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/bhopal/madhya-prade...

jelliclesfarm 4y ago

[..]Mohandas Pai, the former Infosys director and poster boy of Bengaluru’s tech boom, feels the rot runs deep. “There’s a high degree of corruption in every wing: roads, governance and garbage,” Pai tells The Intersection. “The government collects taxes from urban areas, but invests them in rural regions.” He nevertheless thinks the city’s un-livability is an exaggeration. Mohandas Pai, the former Infosys director and poster boy of Bengaluru’s tech boom, feels the rot runs deep. “There’s a high degree of corruption in every wing: roads, governance and garbage,” Pai tells The Intersection. “The government collects taxes from urban areas, but invests them in rural regions.” He nevertheless thinks the city’s un-livability is an exaggeration. [..] He hit the nail on the head. This is exactly the same with Bay Area governance. No local govt..everything is regionally governed and distributed statewide.

xony 4y ago

jelliclesfarm 4y ago

The (elected) Indian city council member of my Bay Area City took others to Bangalore for a show and tell using tax dollars. This trip was later used to defend the high density housing plans. And then there was another trip to Shanghai. (None to Singapore interestingly where high density actually works because the govt is efficient and provides state housing to more than 70% of pop). It was appalling for all immigrants who did come from their over populated high density failed urban centers. In the end, more housing. But our PD has been slashed(more crime now), road diet(more cycle lanes but traffic jams), over crowded schools, higher water and power bills(14hour power disruption yesterday in adjacent neighborhood… Looks like there is a toxic exchange of energy between two corrupt govts that are learning from each other after burping all the tax dollars from the burgeoning tech sector. They have effectively made the tech sector as the villain so the people can fight amongst each other while they can march towards their higher political goals. Many city officials have gone on to state senate. The elected official who organized the Bangalore trip was picked up by one of the FAANG’s billion dollar affordable housing initiatives after their term was over. Hmmm…this feels familiar. Where have I seen this before I moved to the Bay Area?

pts_ 4y ago

Tech's obsession with real estate is oxymoronic and dumb.

w0mbat 4y ago

The article drags in Sunnyvale, where I live, but can’t really find one negative thing to say about it. The population reduction is purely related to COVID WFH leading some people to work from elsewhere, and is temporary. It’s a very nice place to live. Low crime, good schools, great weather, plenty of jobs. Very liveable. This lazy tendency to lump SF in with Silicon Valley is dumb. SF is a peninsula, it’s not in the valley. It has a few niche companies but the huge bulk of the tech industry is down in the valley, which does not have SFs problems.

andbberger 4y ago
horrible public transit, low density/poor walkability, little to no bike infrastructure the whole penninsula is like that, it's awful. night and day between the penninsula and SF, which doesn't even rank that highly on the world stage
- w0mbat 4y ago
  It's very driveable, traffic is fine and parking is easy. Neighborhoods like downtown Mtn View and downtown Sunnyvale (where I live) are very walkable but you don't have to walk. Public transport is not the way to go in the valley, but if you do use it it's much safer than public transport in SF.
  - andbberger 4y ago
    a liveable city, this does not make. and public transport in SF is perfectly safe.
jfim 4y ago
High cost of living, the most exciting thing happening in town is the farmer's market, good schools doesn't apply to all of Sunnyvale, lack of diversity, everything that's moderately interesting is closing down (we lost weird stuff warehouse, fry's, etc.), the list goes on and on. It's liveable if one's idea of living is going to their tech job and maybe hiking on the weekends, but otherwise it's really boring.

refurb 4y ago

To me this is how the system is supposed to work. I mean, people moved to LA after WW2 because it had jobs, cheap real estate and nice weather. It doesn't have cheap real estate or great paying jobs (relatively speaking to COL) any more. Detroit's populations was doubling every decade from 1900 to WW2. Go and visit some time and see the opulent housing downtown. It was the place to be in America. Now it's a lot of abandoned houses. I'm not sure why our goal should be "create cheap housing in the Bay Area". The problem will take care of itself as people move elsewhere (it's already happening) and business cycles remove a lot of easy money. We don't really have to do anything. It's a problem that will solve itself.