8 ms·

Slouching towards San Francisco

96 points by greenie_beans 2y ago

kjellsbells 2y ago
I dont think the transformative zeal that powerful people experience is new. The assumption that expertise in one domain, coupled with money/power and vision must equate to positive results in another. How quickly did America turn from a smallholder society into one trumpeting Manifest Destiny? That seems no different from tech bros trumpeting their utopian cities. It's not exclusively an American thing of course, one thinks of the British of 1800 going from regional naval experts to talking about spreading their idea of civilization to the East in utopian terms. "For the benefit of the natives, you see" doesnt sound very different from the Yarvinesque patter. It's all hubris, of course. The question is how Nemesis arrives, and who she chews up on the way.
TulliusCicero 2y ago
> Instead, local money is now lavished on centrist and right-wing pressure groups — such as GrowSF, Abundant SF, Together SF, and Neighbors for a Better San Francisco — which have in the past four years fundraised over $50 million from conservative tech and real-estate elites. Probably notable that this happened because the left wing managed to fuck things up so badly in its management of the city. For example: * 8,323 homeless people in the city - https://www.sf.gov/data--homeless-population https://www.sf.gov/data--homeless-population * 846m homelessness budget for FY 2024-2025 - https://www.sf.gov/reports--september-2024--hsh-budget-fiscal-year-2024-2026 https://www.sf.gov/reports--september-2024--hsh-budget-fisca... So, a tiny bit over $100k USD per homeless person and they're still not all sheltered (you can see the sheltered vs unsheltered breakdown in the first link). That's an incredible amount of money to not house people. Of course, SF's famously anti-build-anything processes[1] and culture probably don't help when you're trying to provide housing, but ostensibly 'progressive' people are a big part of that unfortunately[2]. 1 - https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/state-report-slams-san-francisco-glacial-expensive-housing-permitting-process/ https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/state-report-slams... 2 - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0094119010000720 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00941...
- transcriptase 2y ago
  When solving a problem becomes a massive interconnected industry of NGOs who never have to show progress, and in fact get more funding the worse the problem gets, there’s little incentive to solve the problem. The rational and effective solutions are decried as “punitive conditionality”, “gatekeeping”, “pathologizing”, “institutional violence” etc. Much easier to pretend that doing more of the same ineffective things will magically start working someday and perpetually blame lack of funding.
- skybrian 2y ago
  Those last two links seem pretty old. I’m wondering how the politics behind building more housing has changed since then?
  - TulliusCicero 2y ago
    Pretty old? The first one is less than two years old, it's October 2023.
    - skybrian 2y ago
      Yes, but there's been an election since then, along with pressure from the state government to build more housing.
- Animats 2y ago
  SF is built out. To build something, you have to tear down something first.
- Aloisius 2y ago
  > That's an incredible amount of money to not house people. Um. If they were housed, they wouldn't be included in the homeless count. Hence the problem using it as a denominator given all the money being spent subsidizing permanent housing for previously homeless people, rent subsidies for people at high risk for becoming homeless, etc. That and it is just the number of homeless (unsheltered or temporarily sheltered) on a particular day, not for the year. The homeless population isn't static.
ethical 2y ago
lol, just ask yourself, where are all my elders? Why are we in a zone of same agers. Ah, ignorance is bliss, your future is elsewhere. Enjoy it whilst it lasts.
svg7 2y ago
> Yet I’m left wondering if ordinary San Franciscans will benefit from the boom, or if the city's newfound wealth will remain concentrated among an increasingly tiny class of digital oligarchs and venture capitalists Thousands of engineers make a lot of money. I think writers like the author sometimes don't realize how much money the median senior engineer makes at Big Tech Of course, most of these said engineers probably came over from a different country, so not sure if this ticks the box for "ordinary San Franciscans"
swalling 2y ago
Lumping centrists who want to solve intractable livability problems with rich right-wing libertarians is the road to failure. Not everyone who wants to stop throwing mountains of money at nonprofits and ineffectual, corrupt city officials is a Peter Thiel/Elon Musk fascist. The more that the left continues to force ideological purity tests like this, the more it will fail. It also seems silly to move to a city internationally known for a specific influential industry and then lament that influence. If you hate entertainment industry people, don’t live in LA. If you hate commercial fishing, don’t live in Dutch Harbor. You’re at least 10-20 years late to fight tech being influential in SF. There are a lot of places to live in this world. Vote with your feet. Conservatives certainly have, migrating en masse to Texas, Florida, Idaho. If you want to see what a place that has actually swung hard right looks like, it’s not SF where the city government is still captured wholly by Democrats and the Board of Supervisors has anti-development NIMBYs and members of the Democratic Socialists of America.
- stanleykm 2y ago
  Centrists dont have a very good track record of actually accomplishing much more than lifting the foot off the accelerator a little bit. I think our problems are intractable right now under the current way we have our economy setup. But left wing solutions are fundamentally incompatible with the people we aim to please the most, so we see this rightward push instead.
  - swalling 2y ago
    It’s unclear from your comment whether you’re talking about things specific to SF or you’re just speaking in generalities. Examples would help.
    - stanleykm 2y ago
      San Francisco’s problems arent much different than the problems of the rest of America (and this can probably be extended to the entire “West”). Money and people with it run the show and are increasing their wealth unsustainably. Any other reasoning about the situation (“DSA” members in city hall) are excuses.
TulliusCicero 2y ago
> Both the city’s public school system and transit systems are crumbling and underfunded, and its housing and homelessness crises remain existential. Some quick googling indicates that SF has something like 3x the per capita city budget as San Jose, a city in the same metro area with similar average rent (according to Zillow). If its city departments manage to still be underfunded in spite of that, something is deeply wrong.
- jefflinwood 2y ago
  San Francisco is both a city and a county, unlike San Jose. In addition, you can't directly compare municipal budgets without taking into account enterprise departments that are meant to be revenue neutral, such as airports - in this case, both have an airport.
  - mikeyouse 2y ago
    True but if you’re talking about per capita spending, the $650M for San Jose’s airport is about a billion dollars less than SF is spending on the much larger and busier SFO, so even that really skews the budgets.
  - 1024core 2y ago
    Read this: https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/08/23/5-charts-that-show-how-california-cities-spent-37-billion-on-public-employees-last-year/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/08/23/5-charts-that-show-ho... San Jose also runs a zoo and an airport.
- BurningFrog 2y ago
  Perhaps SF is not underfunded, but rather spends money ineffectively.
- 1024core 2y ago
  This is what you are looking for: https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/08/23/5-charts-that-show-how-california-cities-spent-37-billion-on-public-employees-last-year/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/08/23/5-charts-that-show-ho...
almost_usual 2y ago
> I unexpectedly moved here two years ago from Chicago I was going to say, this sounds like it was written by someone who wasn’t around during 2012-2016. Aside from AI not much is new. > A tech crash wouldn’t just mean a higher unemployment rate; it would also devastate local businesses and public services. Empty offices, empty coffee shops around those offices, empty balance sheets for coffee beans, and so on. This already happened with COVID and remote work. The city was overflowing with tech hype and industry to support it 10 years ago.
- ak217 2y ago
  Yeah, the number of statements in this essay that, if not uninformed, at least lack perspective, is pretty telling. Anyone who says the Muni is "crumbling" hasn't spent much time in other cities or in SF of a decade or two ago. SFUSD is famous for its dysfunction but anecdotally, friends with kids there say their schools are fine. And the "right-wing pressure groups" she lists are only called these names by ultra-ideologue "progressives" trying to score brownie points with their identity-driven constituencies.
playnine 2y ago
> I glanced at the bookshelves around me — a lot of Isaac Asimov and faddish tech-sponsored print magazines covering “the future of governance and society”. Perhaps because I am in tech I don’t understand how this is a bad “I have to leave this party now” sort of thing. > The city is the indisputable tech capital of the country. Do people think that? “Silicon Valley” is on the other side on the bay and I usually think of it as an amorphous blob that covers a few city borders. I’d have probably said Mountain View if pressed.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  I don’t live in a tech center and at parties I try to avoid mentioning that I work in tech because it’s an instant conversation killer. And I get it. Tech conversations at parties are utterly boring. Even at work they are boring.
  - playnine 2y ago
    Do only people who work in tech read Isaac Asimov? What a great pity.
  - XenophileJKO 2y ago
    That is one of the differences living in silicon valley. It was so refreshing to have conversations on robotics, biology, AI, etc. while watching the kids play at a birthday party. It is generally different when you pass some threshold with enough technical people in a party. It is one of my favorite things about living here.
polalavik 2y ago
Reminded me of this documentary I just watched about humans and Waymo - beautiful and sad. Highly recommend it. Kind of a hard opener, but stick with it https://youtu.be/WsGWqxxMt9k?si=ycrIBGvdy73SLgsA https://youtu.be/WsGWqxxMt9k?si=ycrIBGvdy73SLgsA
mgraczyk 2y ago
Stories like this are fun and I think they resonate well with a lot of people, but unfortunately the details are actively harmful cynicism that ignore fact that would ruin the narrative. Look around San Francisco today. What has changed recently? Crime is way down, lower than it has been in 15 years. Homelessness is down, lower than the past 4 years. Did tech companies decide to start paying more taxes? Did the city start spending more? No, the actual cause is boring and simple, but makes anti-establishment folks very uncomfortable. The truth is that our government started operating more effectively, intentionally trying to solve problems that it previously pretended were insoluble. This change was instigated by a relatively small number of rich people where were fed up and decided to and spend their own money to fix the city. Some other nitpicks I have with the sentiment expressed in the article: * Police and firefighters in SF make more on average than tech workers. Is that a source of injustice? Or is unequal pay more complicated? Is inequality only bad when the groups benefitting are aesthetically undesirable to you? * SF remains one of the highest tax cities in the country, and is the highest in the Bay Area. At the margin, businesses are leaving (including Twitter, mentioned in the article). Raising more taxes on these businesses seems unlikely to increase revenue long term. * We spent more per resident on most services than nearly every other city in the country. Aren't you curious why that is, and doesn't it seem like understanding that problem would lead to insights more interesting than "tech bad"?
- JSR_FDED 2y ago
  > Crime is way down, lower than it has been in 15 years. Homelessness is down, lower than the past 4 years. This makes me so happy. It was heartbreaking to see SF lose the plot the last 10 or so years.
  - stefan_ 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - mgraczyk 2y ago
      That's just not true. Our mayor was able to win in part because he is rich, and clearly that has mattered to change the city. Whether that's good or bad is a different question, but it's very obvious a small number of rich people used their wealth to change the city (and IMO the results have been fantastic so far)
boulos 2y ago
Most discussion of employment is for the San Francisco metro area, but I think the county level statistics at https://data.census.gov/profile/San_Francisco_County,_California?g=050XX00US06075 https://data.census.gov/profile/San_Francisco_County,_Califo... are actually specific to people who live in San Francisco. I never know what business codes / job codes get included in "Professional, scientific, and management, and administrative and waste management" but there's an explicit separate one for Information that is only 6.3% (https://data.census.gov/vizwidget?g=050XX00US06075&infoSection=Industry https://data.census.gov/vizwidget?g=050XX00US06075&infoSecti...) People write about tech jobs because they're highly paid (on average) and highly visible. But it's not the case that the city is entirely dependent on technology. You wouldn't say the same thing about the equally large segment of "Finance and insurance, and real estate and rental and leasing".
w10-1 2y ago
People talk about SF because the US is not otherwise producing much change, and people are hoping things will change. But anecdotes and selective stats pique interest without leading to insight. Too bad this is what drives the zeitgeist!
joshdavham 2y ago
This was a great read! I recently visited SF for the first time in January coming from a city in the Canadian prairies and I really resonate with this article. I was down there for a job interview and the experiences I had whle down there left me with a similar vibe. Two memories in particular that stick out in my mind are 1) that I accidentally reserved an Airbnb in a poor neighbourhood and, while walking over broken glass, I saw one billboard for Vercel to my left and another billboard for Notion AI to my right. 2) I also really wanted to take a Waymo while down there but couldn't because the app required a US zip code. I took an Uber instead and, while the driver lamented about US politics and inequality to me, I saw at least a dozen Waymos zip by with no driver. I really liked SF, but it left a pretty strong impression!
janalsncm 2y ago
> local money is now lavished on centrist and right-wing pressure groups — such as GrowSF, Abundant SF I didn’t know that supply side progressivism was considered right wing or centrist. You build more houses because otherwise working class people can’t afford to live in your city. It’s bad if your kid’s teacher needs roommates or has to commute an hour each morning.
- lanfeust6 2y ago
  It isn't, to anyone except far-left progressives. They want social housing. Depending on the day it will be argued that supply-and-demand doesn't play, or it does but successfully increasing housing elasticity and lowering costs would not help their broader push for socialism of some stripe. Abundance has to fail to satisfy their worldview, housing is completely secondary. I'm not against social housing either. It can play a role, and like Klein and other proponents, I think we should be pragmatic and do what works out politically to meet goals.
- truculent 1y ago
  It is centrist because it fails to propose a different way of doing things or structuring society. Just because it’s a liberal vision, doesn’t mean it’s not centrist. There is certainly overlap with right wing elements, too. Although UK focused, it’s hard not to see the right wing undercurrents in this Abundance-type manifesto: https://ukfoundations.co/ https://ukfoundations.co/
fortenforge 2y ago
The absolute gall of this person, who is a 2 year transplant from Chicago, to cast aspersions on the tech industry. Their evidence of our wrongdoing? * We own the wrong books * We pay both too much and too little in taxes * We support "right wing" pressure groups like GrowSF and "right wing" politicians like Mayor Lurie and Supervisor Bilal Mahmood * We are eager to extend technical expertise to societal problems SF has its problems, but they are largely problems of success. It is much, much better off than cities like Detroit whose main industries are experiencing slow declines.
buss 2y ago
I'm one of the co-founders of an organization mentioned in the article, GrowSF. We focus on common sense outcomes, not political posturing or national progressive rhetoric. The author makes the classic mistake of cynically dismissing the hard work required from regular people to make a difference. And to cast a centrist organization like GrowSF as part of some secret cabal is both lazy and irresponsible journalism. If anyone has any questions about GrowSF, feel free to ask!
- jaredklewis 2y ago
  Thanks for everything you do! I love the data driven approach. I wish basic economics and effective governance had the same tribal magnetism as the culture war issues do.
- teachrdan 1y ago
  It stands to reason that the biggest funders of an organization have the most influence over it. Who are GrowSF's biggest funders? How much money have they given?
  - teachrdan 1y ago
    > If anyone has any questions about GrowSF, feel free to ask! Then crickets when they're asked who funds their multi-million dollar campaigns. "Ask me anything! Except who I answer to!" GrowSF is a front group for wealthy developers and landlords, as well as right wing silicon valley billionaires.
jgalt212 2y ago
> San Francisco looms large over the American imagination. Not for me, or only in the sense if not careful it could become the next Detroit. In 1960, Detroit was the richest city in America. Now, not so much.
eszed 2y ago
Asking the important question: where's this sub-$10 burrito?
jaredsmithse 2y ago
Hard-hitting journalism: billboard proves greedy companies would rather not hire anyone.
anothereng 2y ago
funny how people think anything right wing adjacent is bad.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  Like what?
  - anothereng 2y ago
    you cant say you like a specific policy of the current US administration without people thinking you like the President, etc
    - GuinansEyebrows 2y ago
      can you say a specific policy of the current US administration that you like?
      - AlexeyBelov 1y ago
        - Which views, exactly? - Oh, you know the ones
      - _whiteCaps_ 2y ago
        Halting production of the penny. I think that's the only thing I agree with. (not a US citizen)
      - anothereng 1y ago
        removal of food dies from the food supply

96 points by greenie_beans 2y ago

I dont think the transformative zeal that powerful people experience is new. The assumption that expertise in one domain, coupled with money/power and vision must equate to positive results in another. How quickly did America turn from a smallholder society into one trumpeting Manifest Destiny? That seems no different from tech bros trumpeting their utopian cities. It's not exclusively an American thing of course, one thinks of the British of 1800 going from regional naval experts to talking about spreading their idea of civilization to the East in utopian terms. "For the benefit of the natives, you see" doesnt sound very different from the Yarvinesque patter. It's all hubris, of course. The question is how Nemesis arrives, and who she chews up on the way.

TulliusCicero 2y ago

> Instead, local money is now lavished on centrist and right-wing pressure groups — such as GrowSF, Abundant SF, Together SF, and Neighbors for a Better San Francisco — which have in the past four years fundraised over $50 million from conservative tech and real-estate elites. Probably notable that this happened because the left wing managed to fuck things up so badly in its management of the city. For example: * 8,323 homeless people in the city - https://www.sf.gov/data--homeless-population https://www.sf.gov/data--homeless-population * 846m homelessness budget for FY 2024-2025 - https://www.sf.gov/reports--september-2024--hsh-budget-fiscal-year-2024-2026 https://www.sf.gov/reports--september-2024--hsh-budget-fisca... So, a tiny bit over $100k USD per homeless person and they're still not all sheltered (you can see the sheltered vs unsheltered breakdown in the first link). That's an incredible amount of money to not house people. Of course, SF's famously anti-build-anything processes[1] and culture probably don't help when you're trying to provide housing, but ostensibly 'progressive' people are a big part of that unfortunately[2]. 1 - https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/state-report-slams-san-francisco-glacial-expensive-housing-permitting-process/ https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/state-report-slams... 2 - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0094119010000720 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00941...

transcriptase 2y ago
When solving a problem becomes a massive interconnected industry of NGOs who never have to show progress, and in fact get more funding the worse the problem gets, there’s little incentive to solve the problem. The rational and effective solutions are decried as “punitive conditionality”, “gatekeeping”, “pathologizing”, “institutional violence” etc. Much easier to pretend that doing more of the same ineffective things will magically start working someday and perpetually blame lack of funding.
skybrian 2y ago
Those last two links seem pretty old. I’m wondering how the politics behind building more housing has changed since then?
- TulliusCicero 2y ago
  Pretty old? The first one is less than two years old, it's October 2023.
  - skybrian 2y ago
    Yes, but there's been an election since then, along with pressure from the state government to build more housing.
Animats 2y ago
SF is built out. To build something, you have to tear down something first.
Aloisius 2y ago
> That's an incredible amount of money to not house people. Um. If they were housed, they wouldn't be included in the homeless count. Hence the problem using it as a denominator given all the money being spent subsidizing permanent housing for previously homeless people, rent subsidies for people at high risk for becoming homeless, etc. That and it is just the number of homeless (unsheltered or temporarily sheltered) on a particular day, not for the year. The homeless population isn't static.

ethical 2y ago

lol, just ask yourself, where are all my elders? Why are we in a zone of same agers. Ah, ignorance is bliss, your future is elsewhere. Enjoy it whilst it lasts.

svg7 2y ago

> Yet I’m left wondering if ordinary San Franciscans will benefit from the boom, or if the city's newfound wealth will remain concentrated among an increasingly tiny class of digital oligarchs and venture capitalists Thousands of engineers make a lot of money. I think writers like the author sometimes don't realize how much money the median senior engineer makes at Big Tech Of course, most of these said engineers probably came over from a different country, so not sure if this ticks the box for "ordinary San Franciscans"

swalling 2y ago

Lumping centrists who want to solve intractable livability problems with rich right-wing libertarians is the road to failure. Not everyone who wants to stop throwing mountains of money at nonprofits and ineffectual, corrupt city officials is a Peter Thiel/Elon Musk fascist. The more that the left continues to force ideological purity tests like this, the more it will fail. It also seems silly to move to a city internationally known for a specific influential industry and then lament that influence. If you hate entertainment industry people, don’t live in LA. If you hate commercial fishing, don’t live in Dutch Harbor. You’re at least 10-20 years late to fight tech being influential in SF. There are a lot of places to live in this world. Vote with your feet. Conservatives certainly have, migrating en masse to Texas, Florida, Idaho. If you want to see what a place that has actually swung hard right looks like, it’s not SF where the city government is still captured wholly by Democrats and the Board of Supervisors has anti-development NIMBYs and members of the Democratic Socialists of America.

stanleykm 2y ago
Centrists dont have a very good track record of actually accomplishing much more than lifting the foot off the accelerator a little bit. I think our problems are intractable right now under the current way we have our economy setup. But left wing solutions are fundamentally incompatible with the people we aim to please the most, so we see this rightward push instead.
- swalling 2y ago
  It’s unclear from your comment whether you’re talking about things specific to SF or you’re just speaking in generalities. Examples would help.
  - stanleykm 2y ago
    San Francisco’s problems arent much different than the problems of the rest of America (and this can probably be extended to the entire “West”). Money and people with it run the show and are increasing their wealth unsustainably. Any other reasoning about the situation (“DSA” members in city hall) are excuses.

TulliusCicero 2y ago

> Both the city’s public school system and transit systems are crumbling and underfunded, and its housing and homelessness crises remain existential. Some quick googling indicates that SF has something like 3x the per capita city budget as San Jose, a city in the same metro area with similar average rent (according to Zillow). If its city departments manage to still be underfunded in spite of that, something is deeply wrong.

jefflinwood 2y ago
San Francisco is both a city and a county, unlike San Jose. In addition, you can't directly compare municipal budgets without taking into account enterprise departments that are meant to be revenue neutral, such as airports - in this case, both have an airport.
- mikeyouse 2y ago
  True but if you’re talking about per capita spending, the $650M for San Jose’s airport is about a billion dollars less than SF is spending on the much larger and busier SFO, so even that really skews the budgets.
- 1024core 2y ago
  Read this: https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/08/23/5-charts-that-show-how-california-cities-spent-37-billion-on-public-employees-last-year/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/08/23/5-charts-that-show-ho... San Jose also runs a zoo and an airport.
BurningFrog 2y ago
Perhaps SF is not underfunded, but rather spends money ineffectively.
1024core 2y ago
This is what you are looking for: https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/08/23/5-charts-that-show-how-california-cities-spent-37-billion-on-public-employees-last-year/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/08/23/5-charts-that-show-ho...

almost_usual 2y ago

> I unexpectedly moved here two years ago from Chicago I was going to say, this sounds like it was written by someone who wasn’t around during 2012-2016. Aside from AI not much is new. > A tech crash wouldn’t just mean a higher unemployment rate; it would also devastate local businesses and public services. Empty offices, empty coffee shops around those offices, empty balance sheets for coffee beans, and so on. This already happened with COVID and remote work. The city was overflowing with tech hype and industry to support it 10 years ago.

ak217 2y ago
Yeah, the number of statements in this essay that, if not uninformed, at least lack perspective, is pretty telling. Anyone who says the Muni is "crumbling" hasn't spent much time in other cities or in SF of a decade or two ago. SFUSD is famous for its dysfunction but anecdotally, friends with kids there say their schools are fine. And the "right-wing pressure groups" she lists are only called these names by ultra-ideologue "progressives" trying to score brownie points with their identity-driven constituencies.

playnine 2y ago

> I glanced at the bookshelves around me — a lot of Isaac Asimov and faddish tech-sponsored print magazines covering “the future of governance and society”. Perhaps because I am in tech I don’t understand how this is a bad “I have to leave this party now” sort of thing. > The city is the indisputable tech capital of the country. Do people think that? “Silicon Valley” is on the other side on the bay and I usually think of it as an amorphous blob that covers a few city borders. I’d have probably said Mountain View if pressed.

SoftTalker 2y ago
I don’t live in a tech center and at parties I try to avoid mentioning that I work in tech because it’s an instant conversation killer. And I get it. Tech conversations at parties are utterly boring. Even at work they are boring.
- playnine 2y ago
  Do only people who work in tech read Isaac Asimov? What a great pity.
- XenophileJKO 2y ago
  That is one of the differences living in silicon valley. It was so refreshing to have conversations on robotics, biology, AI, etc. while watching the kids play at a birthday party. It is generally different when you pass some threshold with enough technical people in a party. It is one of my favorite things about living here.

polalavik 2y ago

Reminded me of this documentary I just watched about humans and Waymo - beautiful and sad. Highly recommend it. Kind of a hard opener, but stick with it https://youtu.be/WsGWqxxMt9k?si=ycrIBGvdy73SLgsA https://youtu.be/WsGWqxxMt9k?si=ycrIBGvdy73SLgsA

mgraczyk 2y ago

Stories like this are fun and I think they resonate well with a lot of people, but unfortunately the details are actively harmful cynicism that ignore fact that would ruin the narrative. Look around San Francisco today. What has changed recently? Crime is way down, lower than it has been in 15 years. Homelessness is down, lower than the past 4 years. Did tech companies decide to start paying more taxes? Did the city start spending more? No, the actual cause is boring and simple, but makes anti-establishment folks very uncomfortable. The truth is that our government started operating more effectively, intentionally trying to solve problems that it previously pretended were insoluble. This change was instigated by a relatively small number of rich people where were fed up and decided to and spend their own money to fix the city. Some other nitpicks I have with the sentiment expressed in the article: * Police and firefighters in SF make more on average than tech workers. Is that a source of injustice? Or is unequal pay more complicated? Is inequality only bad when the groups benefitting are aesthetically undesirable to you? * SF remains one of the highest tax cities in the country, and is the highest in the Bay Area. At the margin, businesses are leaving (including Twitter, mentioned in the article). Raising more taxes on these businesses seems unlikely to increase revenue long term. * We spent more per resident on most services than nearly every other city in the country. Aren't you curious why that is, and doesn't it seem like understanding that problem would lead to insights more interesting than "tech bad"?

JSR_FDED 2y ago
> Crime is way down, lower than it has been in 15 years. Homelessness is down, lower than the past 4 years. This makes me so happy. It was heartbreaking to see SF lose the plot the last 10 or so years.
- stefan_ 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - mgraczyk 2y ago
    That's just not true. Our mayor was able to win in part because he is rich, and clearly that has mattered to change the city. Whether that's good or bad is a different question, but it's very obvious a small number of rich people used their wealth to change the city (and IMO the results have been fantastic so far)

boulos 2y ago

Most discussion of employment is for the San Francisco metro area, but I think the county level statistics at https://data.census.gov/profile/San_Francisco_County,_California?g=050XX00US06075 https://data.census.gov/profile/San_Francisco_County,_Califo... are actually specific to people who live in San Francisco. I never know what business codes / job codes get included in "Professional, scientific, and management, and administrative and waste management" but there's an explicit separate one for Information that is only 6.3% (https://data.census.gov/vizwidget?g=050XX00US06075&infoSection=Industry https://data.census.gov/vizwidget?g=050XX00US06075&infoSecti...) People write about tech jobs because they're highly paid (on average) and highly visible. But it's not the case that the city is entirely dependent on technology. You wouldn't say the same thing about the equally large segment of "Finance and insurance, and real estate and rental and leasing".

w10-1 2y ago

People talk about SF because the US is not otherwise producing much change, and people are hoping things will change. But anecdotes and selective stats pique interest without leading to insight. Too bad this is what drives the zeitgeist!

joshdavham 2y ago

This was a great read! I recently visited SF for the first time in January coming from a city in the Canadian prairies and I really resonate with this article. I was down there for a job interview and the experiences I had whle down there left me with a similar vibe. Two memories in particular that stick out in my mind are 1) that I accidentally reserved an Airbnb in a poor neighbourhood and, while walking over broken glass, I saw one billboard for Vercel to my left and another billboard for Notion AI to my right. 2) I also really wanted to take a Waymo while down there but couldn't because the app required a US zip code. I took an Uber instead and, while the driver lamented about US politics and inequality to me, I saw at least a dozen Waymos zip by with no driver. I really liked SF, but it left a pretty strong impression!

janalsncm 2y ago

> local money is now lavished on centrist and right-wing pressure groups — such as GrowSF, Abundant SF I didn’t know that supply side progressivism was considered right wing or centrist. You build more houses because otherwise working class people can’t afford to live in your city. It’s bad if your kid’s teacher needs roommates or has to commute an hour each morning.

lanfeust6 2y ago
It isn't, to anyone except far-left progressives. They want social housing. Depending on the day it will be argued that supply-and-demand doesn't play, or it does but successfully increasing housing elasticity and lowering costs would not help their broader push for socialism of some stripe. Abundance has to fail to satisfy their worldview, housing is completely secondary. I'm not against social housing either. It can play a role, and like Klein and other proponents, I think we should be pragmatic and do what works out politically to meet goals.
truculent 1y ago
It is centrist because it fails to propose a different way of doing things or structuring society. Just because it’s a liberal vision, doesn’t mean it’s not centrist. There is certainly overlap with right wing elements, too. Although UK focused, it’s hard not to see the right wing undercurrents in this Abundance-type manifesto: https://ukfoundations.co/ https://ukfoundations.co/

fortenforge 2y ago

The absolute gall of this person, who is a 2 year transplant from Chicago, to cast aspersions on the tech industry. Their evidence of our wrongdoing? * We own the wrong books * We pay both too much and too little in taxes * We support "right wing" pressure groups like GrowSF and "right wing" politicians like Mayor Lurie and Supervisor Bilal Mahmood * We are eager to extend technical expertise to societal problems SF has its problems, but they are largely problems of success. It is much, much better off than cities like Detroit whose main industries are experiencing slow declines.

buss 2y ago

I'm one of the co-founders of an organization mentioned in the article, GrowSF. We focus on common sense outcomes, not political posturing or national progressive rhetoric. The author makes the classic mistake of cynically dismissing the hard work required from regular people to make a difference. And to cast a centrist organization like GrowSF as part of some secret cabal is both lazy and irresponsible journalism. If anyone has any questions about GrowSF, feel free to ask!

jaredklewis 2y ago
Thanks for everything you do! I love the data driven approach. I wish basic economics and effective governance had the same tribal magnetism as the culture war issues do.
teachrdan 1y ago
It stands to reason that the biggest funders of an organization have the most influence over it. Who are GrowSF's biggest funders? How much money have they given?
- teachrdan 1y ago
  > If anyone has any questions about GrowSF, feel free to ask! Then crickets when they're asked who funds their multi-million dollar campaigns. "Ask me anything! Except who I answer to!" GrowSF is a front group for wealthy developers and landlords, as well as right wing silicon valley billionaires.

jgalt212 2y ago

> San Francisco looms large over the American imagination. Not for me, or only in the sense if not careful it could become the next Detroit. In 1960, Detroit was the richest city in America. Now, not so much.

eszed 2y ago

Asking the important question: where's this sub-$10 burrito?

jaredsmithse 2y ago

Hard-hitting journalism: billboard proves greedy companies would rather not hire anyone.

anothereng 2y ago

funny how people think anything right wing adjacent is bad.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
Like what?
- anothereng 2y ago
  you cant say you like a specific policy of the current US administration without people thinking you like the President, etc
  - GuinansEyebrows 2y ago
    can you say a specific policy of the current US administration that you like?
    - AlexeyBelov 1y ago
      - Which views, exactly? - Oh, you know the ones
    - _whiteCaps_ 2y ago
      Halting production of the penny. I think that's the only thing I agree with. (not a US citizen)
    - anothereng 1y ago
      removal of food dies from the food supply