10 ms·

Yeah, the thing I always say about the people who complain about tech workers and gentrification in a place like San Francisco is like, look, if you can't figur

Yeah, the thing I always say about the people who complain about tech workers and gentrification in a place like San Francisco is like, look, if you can't figure out how to gain from an influx of wealthy, highly-educated, low-criminality, nerdy tech workers, then that's really on you. What a gift! Any city would be lucky to have that "problem." You have to actively work to make that a negative (by, say, refusing to allow almost any new housing for literally decades). The consequences of that decision are fairly obvious and straightforward and they've by now been explained to everybody 50 times, but this is the path these cities choose anyway! It's their choice and it's what they keep choosing. Cities like San Francisco have said clearly, firmly, and repeatedly: "we would rather suffer a housing crisis than allow the city to change too rapidly." At this point what else can you say in response?

fnimick 4y ago
> the people who complain about tech workers and gentrification in a place like San Francisco The people who are complaining about this are not the same people who are restricting housing access. A similar dynamic happens in Boston, where people are resentful of gentrifiers, and I can't blame them. They're not the ones voting to block housing, it's the already rich people in the area who do that.
- xxpor 4y ago
  No, it's both. There's an unholy alliance between the two.
  - fnimick 4y ago
    Why would renters want property values (and therefore rents) to go up due to a lack of supply?
    - raincom 4y ago
      People who live in rent-controlled apartments seem to be against gentrification, as they end up losing their rent-controlled apartments for new construction.
    - jonas21 4y ago
      They don't. But getting people to understand supply and demand is hard. Getting them to blame visible changes in the neighborhood (e.g. fancy new apartment buildings going up) is easy.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  Yes, they are. What do you think "anti-gentrification activism" boils down to, in practice? Build more and drive prices down? Of course not, the activists will conveniently tell you that this makes gentrification worse! Which totally defies economic logic: there's only so much demand in the world for places like Manhattan!
  - majormajor 4y ago
    > Which totally defies economic logic: there's only so much demand in the world for places like Manhattan! How much demand "in the world" to live in Manhattan do you think there is? The more the price drops, of course, the demand will go up. So how much "in the world" at both current prices and also if, say, prices went down by 5%? 10%? 50%? 75%? I think there's enough currently-unmet demand to keep the prices from falling far even if you add supply. (You can also increase demand by building. This is the goal of every property developer ever, after all. To make it worth more than it was when they found it.)
    - tick_tock_tick 4y ago
      > How much demand "in the world" to live in Manhattan do you think there is? Probably somewhere between 4-5 billion people I'd guess.
    - zozbot234 4y ago
      The effective demand for places like Manhattan comes from the highly productive economic activity that can be pursued in such places. So if the demand for places like Manhattan (or Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai etc.) really was that boundless, that would be plenty of reason to build as many of them as possible and speed towards that post-scarcity techno-utopia. (But the ghost cities of China actually show how this can go wrong. So, as it turns out, you can only YIMBY so much.)
      - majormajor 4y ago
        I don't think the demand is literally boundless, but I think the idea that we could easily outpace demand with construction to dramatically increase affordability is wildly optimistic. I'd rather build new Dallases, or denser Dallases, than try to double the density of Manhattan, because it will both be easier to find/acquire un-utilized land to use, and because the amount of work required to double the density of Manhattan is much more intense, construction-wise.
- Aunche 4y ago
  > The people who are complaining about this are not the same people who are restricting housing access. The majority of them think that YIMBY is useless or counterproductive because only luxury apartments are being built. There have even been protests against this [1]. The main problem is that most housing advocacy is focused on taxing tech workers and using that to subsidize rents, which of course does nothing for housing costs, but does help landlords. [1] https://sf.curbed.com/2019/8/7/20759029/excelsior-protest-65-ocean-market-rate https://sf.curbed.com/2019/8/7/20759029/excelsior-protest-65...
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    When building is made a luxury, only luxuries will be built. Quelle surprise! And this is supposed to be an argument against YIMBY?
- mc32 4y ago
  People are of two minds: on the one hand they complain of "middle class flight" decimating the tax base. on the other hand they complain when the middle class "gentrify" a neighborhood. The Mission is probably a decent example. It used to be more or less like Noe Valley many decades back. Then people moved out and was settled by people looking for affordability --then decades later, as housing in Noe Valley etc., was exhausted the Mission was "gentrified" in a slow cycle and people again complain.
luckylion 4y ago
Especially for a city that is explicitly progressive, why the "all rapid change is bad, it must take decades or centuries, otherwise it's not natural" approach? Germany's large cities have similar issues where they don't want to start building new districts because it'd be artificial and not naturally grown building by building. And it's better to have rents double every 10 years, apparently. I don't get the "why", but the approach is fairly explicit -- and politicians get reelected while following it, so I guess it's what "the people" want.
- bradlys 4y ago
  Well - to be more clear - SF is socially progressive. It is incredibly fiscally conservative. It is part of Silicon Valley - a neoliberal paradise. The whole area is incredibly classically liberal and not socialist leaning at all... After all - becoming a tycoon is everyone's wet dream there.
  - klipt 4y ago
    > SF is socially progressive. It is incredibly fiscally conservative Wouldn't "fiscally conservative" mean low taxes and low spending? I believe SF spends about $57,000 annually per homeless person which doesn't sound very fiscally conservative. Of course a lot of that money goes missing while being funneled through the homeless industrial complex...
    - bradlys 4y ago
      > low taxes and low spending? Almost no one in power in the USA is actually low taxes and low spending. Maybe a few libertarians scattered throughout the country that managed to get a seat but they're a very small minority. Everyone is all about high taxes and high spending. It's just "high taxes for thee but not for me". So, for instance, republicans will repeal taxes on the rich and large corporations even when we already tax the middle class W2 earners more than the rich already. Similarly, republicans are huge for the MIC. So much for being fiscally conservative when they want to spend literally hundreds of billions of dollars on a stupid boondoggle airplane that no one gives a shit about. Democrats have the same issues. They also have a hardon for the MIC and spending on stupid shit. The dems in SF will spend it on stupid trashcans or whatever nonsense that doesn't move the bar at all. They will tax the hell out of the working class and spend the money on shit that doesn't improve the material conditions of everyday people. It's why we can't have healthcare. Both parties have no interest because that doesn't make their lobbyists money.
danjac 4y ago
Maybe San Francisco is just not suitable any more? There's nothing magic about SF's geography that makes it a tech hub. It's not a mining town that needs to be next to coal or minerals, or a ski resort town that needs some mountains and snow. It's based on work that can literally be done anywhere. Hollywood, after all, was just a dusty desert town that became the hub of the movie business because it was easier to move there and start a new one than dealing with Edison's lawyers back East, so maybe the tech industry needs to get out of SF, start a new hub somewhere else, and leave the city to the NIMBYs.
- germinalphrase 4y ago
  “Hollywood, after all, was just a dusty desert town that became the hub of the movie business because it was easier to move there and start a new one than dealing with Edison's lawyers back East…” Yes, but also no. Keep in mind the popularity of Westerns in the 1930’s-1950’s and the ease with which you can get to desert/mountain/beach/city/forest/etc settings within a relatively short drive from L.A. That said, I generally agree with your point.
  - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    And sunshine. Sunshine helps when you're shooting outdoors. Southern California has more sunny days than the east.
    - dasil003 4y ago
      And a bit of haze helps the aesthetic as well.
      - sangnoir 4y ago
        They add that in post.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    After all, the Battle of the Bulge did take place in the California desert. Medieval England looks like California, too. Even the alien worlds of Star Trek look suspiciously like California.
gremlinsinc 4y ago
I can't imagine any place will be much of a 'joy' to live in, if there's no barista's, waiters, etc who can afford to live within a 2 hour radius. I mean, if you want a 'servant' class, then you need to at least make it worth their while and ability to thrive. Everyone wants to be able to go to Olive Garden, or McDonald's but there won't be these places if people can't afford to live there. There will always be lesser jobs, but not if nobody can live for the wage given to them. The only answer is more housing, and/or higher wages. Probably both, but esp more housing.
vkou 4y ago
> if you can't figure out how to gain from an influx of wealthy, highly-educated, low-criminality, nerdy tech workers, then that's really on you Oh, people are gaining from them. It's just that the people gaining are generally the people who already have political power. Someone who owns their home doesn't mind seeing land values quadruple, thanks to this influx of free tech money. Someone who is renting, so that they can save up money for a downpayment, whose service industry wages have not quadrupled in that period of time minds very, very much.
wolverine876 4y ago
> if you can't figure out how to gain from an influx of wealthy, highly-educated, low-criminality, nerdy tech workers, then that's really on you. What a gift! Those tech workers, once they move, are not customers, they are the city. It's their city as much as anyone's, any failures or successes are theirs; what have they done?
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > what have they done? This should be easy to answer once the city starts cutting its budget.
- lelandbatey 4y ago
  New arrivals to a city, no matter their socioeconomic status, in the aggregate, have less influence than folks who are long established in the city. It's a human thing.
- adasdasdas 4y ago
  They made it easier/more profitable to develop land by driving prices up
  - xapata 4y ago
    Not in the places they left.
- closeparen 4y ago
  Recent arrivals pay the lion’s share of property taxes thanks to Prop 13. Income tax on tech wages and stocks gave California its budget surplus in recent years. Political advocacy is a bit more limited, but you have to keep in mind that tech is heavily foreign born. I’m the only one of my work friends who can vote.
colechristensen 4y ago
It’s really the opposite, they wanted to gain too much from it. If your city wants to keep it’s style of residential density, fine, limit commercial growth, stop adding jobs to the city if you won’t add housing to match it. And that would be fine, plenty of other places would benefit from spreading the tech wealth around.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
emptysongglass 4y ago
I didn't want the tech workers flowing into Seattle with Amazon's decision to invade by building their HQ right in the heart. There was a lot of music culture there, at Cap Hill, in the basements of Seattle families that had lived there a long time. It really felt, if you were there, like an invasion: nobody coming in had any context of what was already there, they just took and took and all they could offer was software expertise and money. The city lapped it up. Sometimes it isn't about just building to accomodating: it's about hey we don't know who you are, you just heard our city was the place to be but you didn't care about the music or the art just came in clueless. We're not good stewards of the places we move to. We move in and pillage. Our lives are code and Zoom stand-ups, which fine whatever but what are you bringing in outside your code and Nanoleaf wall lights that give you just enough design to be tech-hip. We're raiders, trading our money for jacked up bulletproof lattes and a scene that doesn't belong to us, nodding along to punk music that's not for us, not about us except as the enemy. Honestly, the best thing Microsoft did was have their own little stronghold out in Redmond. Amazon upended that careful respect-at-a-distance by landing their dumb super-HQ like an atomic bomb in downtown Seattle.
- simfree 4y ago
  The displacement is real, Ballard used to be mostly Boeing employees, but your not going to be buying there with Boeing's pay and stability problems today. Visiting Georgetown is a glimpse into the Seattle of 20 years ago IMO. It has it's charm. Amazon is definitely a turn and burn, threadbare employer that doesn't understand how to value talent and internal resources they develop. Low and mid-level employees are like chewing gum to them, lasting a year or two before Amazon spits them out. Many of their workers embrace this mentality, making decisions based around their ephemeral stay in Seattle that normal Seattleites find off-putting.
- beaned 4y ago
  When a company creates a new HQ, it's displacement. When a company leaves a town (especially a small one) it leaves people jobless and they are evil for it. On the surface it seems some people think cities should stay entirely static forever, frozen at the particular time when they remembered they enjoyed it most. The people moving in will have their own experiences. Places change. If you don't like your place, work to make it better or find one you like more. Maybe not everyone in your city is into the arts and "scene" as much as you are, and the changes are a net benefit to them.

fnimick 4y ago

> the people who complain about tech workers and gentrification in a place like San Francisco The people who are complaining about this are not the same people who are restricting housing access. A similar dynamic happens in Boston, where people are resentful of gentrifiers, and I can't blame them. They're not the ones voting to block housing, it's the already rich people in the area who do that.

xxpor 4y ago
No, it's both. There's an unholy alliance between the two.
- fnimick 4y ago
  Why would renters want property values (and therefore rents) to go up due to a lack of supply?
  - raincom 4y ago
    People who live in rent-controlled apartments seem to be against gentrification, as they end up losing their rent-controlled apartments for new construction.
  - jonas21 4y ago
    They don't. But getting people to understand supply and demand is hard. Getting them to blame visible changes in the neighborhood (e.g. fancy new apartment buildings going up) is easy.
zozbot234 4y ago
Yes, they are. What do you think "anti-gentrification activism" boils down to, in practice? Build more and drive prices down? Of course not, the activists will conveniently tell you that this makes gentrification worse! Which totally defies economic logic: there's only so much demand in the world for places like Manhattan!
- majormajor 4y ago
  > Which totally defies economic logic: there's only so much demand in the world for places like Manhattan! How much demand "in the world" to live in Manhattan do you think there is? The more the price drops, of course, the demand will go up. So how much "in the world" at both current prices and also if, say, prices went down by 5%? 10%? 50%? 75%? I think there's enough currently-unmet demand to keep the prices from falling far even if you add supply. (You can also increase demand by building. This is the goal of every property developer ever, after all. To make it worth more than it was when they found it.)
  - tick_tock_tick 4y ago
    > How much demand "in the world" to live in Manhattan do you think there is? Probably somewhere between 4-5 billion people I'd guess.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    The effective demand for places like Manhattan comes from the highly productive economic activity that can be pursued in such places. So if the demand for places like Manhattan (or Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai etc.) really was that boundless, that would be plenty of reason to build as many of them as possible and speed towards that post-scarcity techno-utopia. (But the ghost cities of China actually show how this can go wrong. So, as it turns out, you can only YIMBY so much.)
    - majormajor 4y ago
      I don't think the demand is literally boundless, but I think the idea that we could easily outpace demand with construction to dramatically increase affordability is wildly optimistic. I'd rather build new Dallases, or denser Dallases, than try to double the density of Manhattan, because it will both be easier to find/acquire un-utilized land to use, and because the amount of work required to double the density of Manhattan is much more intense, construction-wise.
Aunche 4y ago
> The people who are complaining about this are not the same people who are restricting housing access. The majority of them think that YIMBY is useless or counterproductive because only luxury apartments are being built. There have even been protests against this [1]. The main problem is that most housing advocacy is focused on taxing tech workers and using that to subsidize rents, which of course does nothing for housing costs, but does help landlords. [1] https://sf.curbed.com/2019/8/7/20759029/excelsior-protest-65-ocean-market-rate https://sf.curbed.com/2019/8/7/20759029/excelsior-protest-65...
- zozbot234 4y ago
  When building is made a luxury, only luxuries will be built. Quelle surprise! And this is supposed to be an argument against YIMBY?
mc32 4y ago
People are of two minds: on the one hand they complain of "middle class flight" decimating the tax base. on the other hand they complain when the middle class "gentrify" a neighborhood. The Mission is probably a decent example. It used to be more or less like Noe Valley many decades back. Then people moved out and was settled by people looking for affordability --then decades later, as housing in Noe Valley etc., was exhausted the Mission was "gentrified" in a slow cycle and people again complain.

luckylion 4y ago

Especially for a city that is explicitly progressive, why the "all rapid change is bad, it must take decades or centuries, otherwise it's not natural" approach? Germany's large cities have similar issues where they don't want to start building new districts because it'd be artificial and not naturally grown building by building. And it's better to have rents double every 10 years, apparently. I don't get the "why", but the approach is fairly explicit -- and politicians get reelected while following it, so I guess it's what "the people" want.

bradlys 4y ago
Well - to be more clear - SF is socially progressive. It is incredibly fiscally conservative. It is part of Silicon Valley - a neoliberal paradise. The whole area is incredibly classically liberal and not socialist leaning at all... After all - becoming a tycoon is everyone's wet dream there.
- klipt 4y ago
  > SF is socially progressive. It is incredibly fiscally conservative Wouldn't "fiscally conservative" mean low taxes and low spending? I believe SF spends about $57,000 annually per homeless person which doesn't sound very fiscally conservative. Of course a lot of that money goes missing while being funneled through the homeless industrial complex...
  - bradlys 4y ago
    > low taxes and low spending? Almost no one in power in the USA is actually low taxes and low spending. Maybe a few libertarians scattered throughout the country that managed to get a seat but they're a very small minority. Everyone is all about high taxes and high spending. It's just "high taxes for thee but not for me". So, for instance, republicans will repeal taxes on the rich and large corporations even when we already tax the middle class W2 earners more than the rich already. Similarly, republicans are huge for the MIC. So much for being fiscally conservative when they want to spend literally hundreds of billions of dollars on a stupid boondoggle airplane that no one gives a shit about. Democrats have the same issues. They also have a hardon for the MIC and spending on stupid shit. The dems in SF will spend it on stupid trashcans or whatever nonsense that doesn't move the bar at all. They will tax the hell out of the working class and spend the money on shit that doesn't improve the material conditions of everyday people. It's why we can't have healthcare. Both parties have no interest because that doesn't make their lobbyists money.

danjac 4y ago

Maybe San Francisco is just not suitable any more? There's nothing magic about SF's geography that makes it a tech hub. It's not a mining town that needs to be next to coal or minerals, or a ski resort town that needs some mountains and snow. It's based on work that can literally be done anywhere. Hollywood, after all, was just a dusty desert town that became the hub of the movie business because it was easier to move there and start a new one than dealing with Edison's lawyers back East, so maybe the tech industry needs to get out of SF, start a new hub somewhere else, and leave the city to the NIMBYs.

germinalphrase 4y ago
“Hollywood, after all, was just a dusty desert town that became the hub of the movie business because it was easier to move there and start a new one than dealing with Edison's lawyers back East…” Yes, but also no. Keep in mind the popularity of Westerns in the 1930’s-1950’s and the ease with which you can get to desert/mountain/beach/city/forest/etc settings within a relatively short drive from L.A. That said, I generally agree with your point.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  And sunshine. Sunshine helps when you're shooting outdoors. Southern California has more sunny days than the east.
  - dasil003 4y ago
    And a bit of haze helps the aesthetic as well.
    - sangnoir 4y ago
      They add that in post.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  After all, the Battle of the Bulge did take place in the California desert. Medieval England looks like California, too. Even the alien worlds of Star Trek look suspiciously like California.

gremlinsinc 4y ago

I can't imagine any place will be much of a 'joy' to live in, if there's no barista's, waiters, etc who can afford to live within a 2 hour radius. I mean, if you want a 'servant' class, then you need to at least make it worth their while and ability to thrive. Everyone wants to be able to go to Olive Garden, or McDonald's but there won't be these places if people can't afford to live there. There will always be lesser jobs, but not if nobody can live for the wage given to them. The only answer is more housing, and/or higher wages. Probably both, but esp more housing.

vkou 4y ago

> if you can't figure out how to gain from an influx of wealthy, highly-educated, low-criminality, nerdy tech workers, then that's really on you Oh, people are gaining from them. It's just that the people gaining are generally the people who already have political power. Someone who owns their home doesn't mind seeing land values quadruple, thanks to this influx of free tech money. Someone who is renting, so that they can save up money for a downpayment, whose service industry wages have not quadrupled in that period of time minds very, very much.

wolverine876 4y ago

> if you can't figure out how to gain from an influx of wealthy, highly-educated, low-criminality, nerdy tech workers, then that's really on you. What a gift! Those tech workers, once they move, are not customers, they are the city. It's their city as much as anyone's, any failures or successes are theirs; what have they done?

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> what have they done? This should be easy to answer once the city starts cutting its budget.
lelandbatey 4y ago
New arrivals to a city, no matter their socioeconomic status, in the aggregate, have less influence than folks who are long established in the city. It's a human thing.
adasdasdas 4y ago
They made it easier/more profitable to develop land by driving prices up
- xapata 4y ago
  Not in the places they left.
closeparen 4y ago
Recent arrivals pay the lion’s share of property taxes thanks to Prop 13. Income tax on tech wages and stocks gave California its budget surplus in recent years. Political advocacy is a bit more limited, but you have to keep in mind that tech is heavily foreign born. I’m the only one of my work friends who can vote.

colechristensen 4y ago

It’s really the opposite, they wanted to gain too much from it. If your city wants to keep it’s style of residential density, fine, limit commercial growth, stop adding jobs to the city if you won’t add housing to match it. And that would be fine, plenty of other places would benefit from spreading the tech wealth around.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

emptysongglass 4y ago

I didn't want the tech workers flowing into Seattle with Amazon's decision to invade by building their HQ right in the heart. There was a lot of music culture there, at Cap Hill, in the basements of Seattle families that had lived there a long time. It really felt, if you were there, like an invasion: nobody coming in had any context of what was already there, they just took and took and all they could offer was software expertise and money. The city lapped it up. Sometimes it isn't about just building to accomodating: it's about hey we don't know who you are, you just heard our city was the place to be but you didn't care about the music or the art just came in clueless. We're not good stewards of the places we move to. We move in and pillage. Our lives are code and Zoom stand-ups, which fine whatever but what are you bringing in outside your code and Nanoleaf wall lights that give you just enough design to be tech-hip. We're raiders, trading our money for jacked up bulletproof lattes and a scene that doesn't belong to us, nodding along to punk music that's not for us, not about us except as the enemy. Honestly, the best thing Microsoft did was have their own little stronghold out in Redmond. Amazon upended that careful respect-at-a-distance by landing their dumb super-HQ like an atomic bomb in downtown Seattle.

simfree 4y ago
The displacement is real, Ballard used to be mostly Boeing employees, but your not going to be buying there with Boeing's pay and stability problems today. Visiting Georgetown is a glimpse into the Seattle of 20 years ago IMO. It has it's charm. Amazon is definitely a turn and burn, threadbare employer that doesn't understand how to value talent and internal resources they develop. Low and mid-level employees are like chewing gum to them, lasting a year or two before Amazon spits them out. Many of their workers embrace this mentality, making decisions based around their ephemeral stay in Seattle that normal Seattleites find off-putting.
beaned 4y ago
When a company creates a new HQ, it's displacement. When a company leaves a town (especially a small one) it leaves people jobless and they are evil for it. On the surface it seems some people think cities should stay entirely static forever, frozen at the particular time when they remembered they enjoyed it most. The people moving in will have their own experiences. Places change. If you don't like your place, work to make it better or find one you like more. Maybe not everyone in your city is into the arts and "scene" as much as you are, and the changes are a net benefit to them.