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Protesters Smash Google Shuttle Bus Piñata In Fight Against Rent Increases

73 points by chengyinliu 13y ago

RandallBrown 13y ago
What is the solution to this problem? You can stop rent increases with a law, but that causes lots of other problems. You can get rid of the buses with a law, but then people will just drive or use other transportation, which causes traffic problems.
- borlak 13y ago
  What is the "problem" that you want solved?
  - patmcguire 13y ago
    Massive rent increases, the bad aspects of gentrification. Rent in some places is doubling in a year. http://uptownalmanac.com/2012/05/rental-prices-wwaayy-every-neighborhood-you-want-live http://uptownalmanac.com/2012/05/rental-prices-wwaayy-every-...
    - tomkarlo 13y ago
      Rent increases are terrible for renters (and I rent), but great for homeowners (in that they generally track rising real-estate values.) It's mostly just a matter of perspective. Nobody seems to complain that the housing market in SF is on fire for the same reasons that rents are up.
      - mbreese 13y ago
        It's not just SF... a lot of people complain about the Bay Area housing market in general - just not the sellers. Even if you can afford to buy a house, it's damn near impossible to find one because sellers are getting many offers on the first day/week (a lot of which are in cash). And a lot of these offers aren't from homeowners, but rather investment companies. There was a good article in the SJ Mercury News last month about it [1]. Even if you want a house (and can afford one), the market just doesn't have enough supply, so people are then stuck renting. It really is a pretty big problem. [1] http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_22930687/bay-areas-average-homebuyers-shut-out-by-cash http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_22930687/bay-areas-av...
        tomkarlo 13y ago
        It's probably because homeowners are (almost always) voters in a district, whereas potential home buyers probably aren't, and renters are somewhat less likely to be than homeowners. You'd expect policies designed to keep homeowners happy.
      - artsrc 13y ago
        Unlike many people in this thread, I loved living and working in San Francisco. And I live on the other side of the world, where house prices are too high, it causes massive problems, and nobody complains about it. In fact prices in my suburb are about twice what they seem to be in parts of SF where it is quite safe to live: http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/720-722-34th-Ave-San-Francisco-CA-94121/15097237_zpid/ http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/720-722-34th-Ave-San-Franc... Here a big fall in house prices is seen as a risk rather than a good thing.
- w1ntermute 13y ago
  The real culprit here is draconian zoning laws which are drastically limiting the economic potential of this country and leaving millions of people unemployed or underemployed: http://www.amazon.com/The-Rent-Damn-High-ebook/dp/B0078XGJXO http://www.amazon.com/The-Rent-Damn-High-ebook/dp/B0078XGJXO If you were to remove many of the laws restricting redevelopment and the construction of tall buildings, everyone would benefit - property owners, property developers, tenants, local stores, rich people, poor people, the government, etc.
  - _delirium 13y ago
    Some decent urban planning would help as well. For one thing, SF's public transit is poor, it has too many cars, and its bike infrastructure is poor. It should take 15 minutes to get from the Sunset to SoMA by subway, but it takes an hour by antiquated streetcar. And if you try to bike it, you're constantly stopping at lights and sharing streets with cars, instead of on a proper bikeway. Compare Copenhagen for an example of how to do it better. Also, some more integrated policies would help; the ridiculous fragmentation of municipal governments and transit districts doesn't improve the situation. Why are BART, Muni, Caltrain, AC Transit, and the VTA run in such an uncoordinated manner? Why doesn't BART go down the peninsula? Why are there miles of light rail in the middle of nowhere in Santa Clara County, but not in more dense areas? Why is there no higher-density housing near the Caltrain stations in places like Palo Alto?
- bcoates 13y ago
  The root of the problem is the tension of interests between the landlords who gain from an increase in property values, even if it prices out current residents, and the residents who have perverse incentives to make their area a worse place to live to keep out the yuppies. Maybe you could securitize the value of the tenant's rent control, entitling an exiting tenant to a windfall if they are replaced by a higher-rent paying replacement? This would be on the theory that residential property values are an externality created by the people living there.
  - uvdiv 13y ago
    Maybe you could securitize the value of the tenant's rent control, entitling an exiting tenant to a windfall if they are replaced by a higher-rent paying replacement? Can you clarify how this is different from simply prohibiting rental, forcing residents to own their apartment? A securitized right to property value increases sounds a lot like equity. edit: Oh I'm stupid. Clearly you mean all of this under price control: the renter gets the benefits of equity, without paying anything for them, and without taking on any risk of ownership (like property values collapsing). A complete soup of misincentives and disaster.
    - bcoates 13y ago
      "Securitize" was the wrong word for me to use, as no uninvolved third party is coming into the picture. The difference between owning and renting is already a matter of degrees, particularly once you add rent control, mortgages, condos and HOAs into the mix. The renter already has the right to deprive the owner of the property value increase, this is just creating a legal framework to give it back for cash. I'm imagining it would only be part of the value of increase in rent over the rent-control limit, not all of it. It would increase market price rents modestly, as you're essentially depriving landlords of the power to shake off bad tenants by finding rent control loopholes or waiting them out, but you could offset that by creating a process for voluntary tenant buyouts. Buyouts are currently very difficult to carry out legally even if the tenant wants to leave and the landlord would rather replace them with someone paying more, leaving the two parties stuck together in an unhappy marriage as an unintended side effect of the way the laws work. In response to your edit: Of course you'd pay for them, new rentals are market-priced (then locked into rent control until that tenant leaves), aren't they? It's got one-sided risk like any option but those aren't hard to price. It's in everyone's interest to increase the future value of the rental unit.
ChuckMcM 13y ago
"Cheap grocery stores and eateries have been going out of business, while trendy bars and cafes move in." Probably a moot point but do those new bars and cafes provide jobs? Do these people tip more or less than those who used to frequent the 'Cheap eateries' ? I am sympathetic to the challenges of having a neighborhood go from affordable to "hip" (and not affordable) but does this bring more disposable income into San Francisco and increase the available money supply or not?
- slg 13y ago
  Yes, these type of transitions improve the neighborhood as a whole including raising wages, but those things happen in the aggregate. Like most economic transitions that means a bunch of individuals suffer while the collective benefits in the long run.
- aaronbrethorst 13y ago
  I doubt they increased their tipping 29% between 2011 and 2012. Viewing the situation from a distance, it appears that the key issue in SF today is that the Board of Supervisors is unwilling to relax zoning laws[1]. San Francisco obviously can't build out, so the only option is to build up. Until that happens, things will just keep getting worse. [1] http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/11/san_francisco_zoning_needs_more_density_and_tall_buildings.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/11/san_francisco...
  - tiredofcareer 13y ago
    The residents who fight tooth and nail against going up and more dense forms of housing are just as much to blame as the BoS. The city could ignore them, yes, but government is about what people want. Most residents of San Francisco -- homeless, tech, lower-income, whatever -- want absolutely nothing to change except for what makes them happier. And in most cases, the loudest, wealthiest, Pac Heights/Sea Cliff voices want the "charm" of San Francisco to stay the same. Meanwhile, it's one of the most undesirable places to merely walk around that I've come across in my life, and I only work in the city because I have to. I will never move to the city. Some of the comments are already popping up on TechCrunch; "do you want SF to be the next NYC?" My answer to that is abso-fucking-lutely. New York City is perfectly suited to dense living without gritting your teeth; the subways run 24/7, the risk of stepping in homeless shit is significantly lower, there are very few places in NYC that make me cringe as much as the TL after sundown, the varying cultures get along and complement each other instead of beating Google Bus piñatas at a dirty-ass BART station... If San Francisco slowly became the next New York City I'd be pleased as a peach. (Imagine NYC with SF's weather!) But it will never happen in our lifetimes. Honestly, I think it's a California thing, because L.A. has a better shot at it and that's not going to happen either.
mc-lovin 13y ago
As someone who generally believes in free markets, I am already unsympathetic to these people. However the venom directed at tech employees strikes me as something more than just economics. People are having a go at nerds because they can. The scales of social status haven't changed since high school, but it turns out that nerds can earn a good salary, and in the "fascist" free market economy, this means they can live where they like, and the police will even protect them! I wish I knew about this so I could show up in my Google sweater.
- sp332 13y ago
  There's a difference between free-market economics and saying that poorer people don't deserve a voice in local government because they don't have money. I don't believe a particular public sidewalk should get preferential treatment just because richer people walk on it.
  - mc-lovin 13y ago
    How do poorer people lack a voice in local government? It seems to me their issue is that they want to extend their control over local affairs far beyond what is their right. It is simply not the right of local residents to determine what kind of person gets to live in that neighborhood. This was a block "party" to make a very specific kind of person feel unwelcome. And then they think of themselves as oppressed when the police break it up.
    - markdown 13y ago
      > How do poorer people lack a voice in local government? ... And then they think of themselves as oppressed when the police break it up. Police breaking up a non-violent protest of only 40 people... yes, that's the definition of oppression. I don't like what you have to say so I'll shut you up is oppression. Have you ever read your constitution? These people are douchebags, but what they were doing should not have been stopped.
      - mc-lovin 13y ago
eeeeaaii 13y ago
"Funding some local education or beautification initiatives could go a long way to reducing the gentrification backlash." Or maybe California could relax its constitutional restriction on city and county income taxes, which would make much more sense than relying on random benefactors to make the city more livable.
lsb 13y ago
I'll consider land use complaints from Miwok and Ohlone, but I'm not sure how "my neighborhood is different from how it was 15 years ago" is a valid concern. A vibrant city can't be a museum.
- lambdacat 13y ago
  The issue is who is affected by changes to the city. It is always the poor and underprivileged who are pushed to the periphery by the privileged. Change should be shaped in ways that don't involuntarily displace people.
rayiner 13y ago
Rents wouldn't be going up so fast if these protestors were protesting draconian building and zoning laws instead of Google employees. NIMBY-ism hurts lower income people first.
- subsystem 13y ago
  Do you have anything to back that up? I would imagine that most lower income people have already been hit and preserving status quo might be in the interest of anyone who has managed to stay. At least in the short run.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    Rent control drives up rents for everyone who isn't in a rent controlled apartment. Those higher rents affect the young guy working at Starbucks, who is unlikely to have a rent controlled apartment, before it affects the young guy who works at Google, who is also unlikely to have a rent controlled apartment but can at least better afford the resulting rent increases.
ryanobjc 13y ago
I wonder how many commenters here actually live in SF or know anything about it... San Francisco has one of the most tenant friendly laws in the entire country. Rent control is very strict, and the whole "rent has gone up by X%" ... well it has gone up no more than 1% for existing tenants. Because that is the legal limit. New units are not subject to rent control, but if you don't move, then you will never really pay much more for rent. People in my building pay 50% what I pay for the same layout, and new people will probably pay 2x what I am paying for the same layout as well. Commercial property tho doesnt have rent control however. But that's kind of a different argument, right?
- MattLaroche 13y ago
  Rent control is only on buildings over 35 years old, and not when one rents a condo directly from its owner. There's other rules, but it's very much not "no more than 1% for existing tenants." Many, many people are rent controlled, but it is not everyone.
- tptacek 13y ago
  Rent control doesn't apply to single-family homes or new construction (anything built after 1979, according to SFTU). And owners can get around rent control, for instance by using owner move-in evictions.
- raldi 13y ago
  > Commercial property tho doesnt have rent control however. But they still generally pay far, far less property tax than they should: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(1978)#Effects_on_commercial_property_owners http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(1978...
- old-gregg 13y ago
  > San Francisco has one of the most tenant friendly laws in the entire country What? SF is infested by rent-controlled buildings. Rent control is the most tenant-hostile policy ever invented. It basically means that newcomers (or people who had to move) are subsidizing ridiculous rents of those who haven't moved in a while. Rent control restricts the freedom of movement. My barber pays $1600 for a 2br apartment two blocks from the my building where a shitty 1br got rented within an hour after showing up on craigslist. The very same 1br was $2,400 just a year ago, and $2,200 two years ago.
grbalaffa 13y ago
Anybody else watch the video? There were at least as many cops as protestors present. It's eerily reminiscent of those pictures from OWS where the cops were lined up outside banks.
- jurassic 13y ago
  Tax dollars at work!
- gyardley 13y ago
  Sure, but in both cases that's because when there aren't as many cops, these protests result in widespread property damage. This has unfortunately been the case since the WTO protests in Seattle in late 1999.
- thrownaway2424 13y ago
  The protest is right across the street from the cop shop.
- beatpanda 13y ago
  Yeah, look, given the organizers, I am shocked there weren't a bunch of fires in the streets last night. So from a distance the police presence looks like overkill, and I am no fan of the police in general, but they had every reason to believe the event yesterday was going to turn violent.
modarts 13y ago
Why are tech employees and companies the getting the blame for increased rent? Last I checked it was the property owners and landlords who control that. How far back do they want to go? Protesting in front of Tim Berners-Lee's house for being an enabling force in the creation of the technology that runs Google and other companies?
- natrius 13y ago
  Property owners and landlords will charge the highest rent they can convince someone to pay, so treating them as active agents in this scenario doesn't seem useful to me. Supply and demand determine what people are willing to pay for housing, and tech workers are willing to pay a lot.
magicalist 13y ago
> As a three-year resident of the Mission, I’ve seen the influx of money from the rise of Apple and Google’s stock plus the Facebook IPO change its character. It seems weird for the writer to try to separate himself from this. The mission starting gentrifying well before 2010, there was just a bit of a lull at the end of the last decade. Not to put too fine a point on it, but he's a white stanford-grad who covers the tech industry for a website. Even if you're a poor recent college graduate with five roommates, your presence changes the character of the neighborhood.
- GuiA 13y ago
  Of course, but he's writing an article about the underdogs; naturally he'd rather identify with them :)
navyrain 13y ago
The core problem here is that high-earners are being concentrated in one area. If the Google employes weren't expected to commute to a computer, and were free to remote in from anywhere, their economic impact on their neighborhoods would be distributed, rather than concentrated in a couple locations.
- Steko 13y ago
  Actually, the core problem is out of control zoning restrictions. Recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5651918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5651918
  - thrownaway2424 13y ago
    To be clear, the out-of-control things belong to governments outside SF, SJ, and Oak. The three major cities continue to add housing at a fair clip, as they have for the last 15 years.
- jopof 13y ago
  Google/Facebook employees don't work anywhere near SF. They live in SF because it's hip, and endure huge commutes (on the comfy buses) to do so. Maybe if G/F stopped subsidizing ridiculous commutes with the comfy buses, employees would live in the low-cost housing areas near campus.
  - philsnow 13y ago
    > low-cost housing areas near campus. "relatively". relatively low-cost housing areas. Also, it's not a comparable living experience at all. Mountain View is bikeable, sure, but it's not walkable.
  - redcircle 13y ago
    Do you mean East Palo Alto, or the whole valley? There is almost no housing supply in the valley. I have the feeling that engineers are now priced out of the market in the valley. Houses sell to bidders that offer no contingencies, cash, and a price that exceeds a lender's appraisal.
akkartik 13y ago
I showed a friend this, and he pointed out the awesome quasi-gonzo http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n03/rebecca-solnit/diary http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n03/rebecca-solnit/diary.
- mturmon 13y ago
  It's a nice outsider article. Funny-because-it-hurts: "All these youngish people are on the Google Bus because they want to live in San Francisco, city of promenading and mingling, but they seem as likely to rub these things out as to participate in them." Earlier HN discussion, studiously failing to appreciate the piece: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5189580 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5189580
jstalin 13y ago
I bet more regulations will fix it.
racecar789 13y ago
I can understand the outrage these displaced people feel. Especially for the hard working lower class. It is not displacement for a public works project. It is pure class displacement with a rub-it-in-their-face quality about it.
tzs 13y ago
Are Google/Facebook/Apple employees living in that neighborhood because the company shuttle buses make it convenient, or did the companies start sending shuttles there because so many employees live there?
flatfilefan 13y ago
Yuppies and Gentrification are antonims in my book. Does the author know what those words mean?

73 points by chengyinliu 13y ago

What is the solution to this problem? You can stop rent increases with a law, but that causes lots of other problems. You can get rid of the buses with a law, but then people will just drive or use other transportation, which causes traffic problems.

borlak 13y ago
What is the "problem" that you want solved?
- patmcguire 13y ago
  Massive rent increases, the bad aspects of gentrification. Rent in some places is doubling in a year. http://uptownalmanac.com/2012/05/rental-prices-wwaayy-every-neighborhood-you-want-live http://uptownalmanac.com/2012/05/rental-prices-wwaayy-every-...
  - tomkarlo 13y ago
    Rent increases are terrible for renters (and I rent), but great for homeowners (in that they generally track rising real-estate values.) It's mostly just a matter of perspective. Nobody seems to complain that the housing market in SF is on fire for the same reasons that rents are up.
    - mbreese 13y ago
      It's not just SF... a lot of people complain about the Bay Area housing market in general - just not the sellers. Even if you can afford to buy a house, it's damn near impossible to find one because sellers are getting many offers on the first day/week (a lot of which are in cash). And a lot of these offers aren't from homeowners, but rather investment companies. There was a good article in the SJ Mercury News last month about it [1]. Even if you want a house (and can afford one), the market just doesn't have enough supply, so people are then stuck renting. It really is a pretty big problem. [1] http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_22930687/bay-areas-average-homebuyers-shut-out-by-cash http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_22930687/bay-areas-av...
      - tomkarlo 13y ago
        It's probably because homeowners are (almost always) voters in a district, whereas potential home buyers probably aren't, and renters are somewhat less likely to be than homeowners. You'd expect policies designed to keep homeowners happy.
    - artsrc 13y ago
      Unlike many people in this thread, I loved living and working in San Francisco. And I live on the other side of the world, where house prices are too high, it causes massive problems, and nobody complains about it. In fact prices in my suburb are about twice what they seem to be in parts of SF where it is quite safe to live: http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/720-722-34th-Ave-San-Francisco-CA-94121/15097237_zpid/ http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/720-722-34th-Ave-San-Franc... Here a big fall in house prices is seen as a risk rather than a good thing.
w1ntermute 13y ago
The real culprit here is draconian zoning laws which are drastically limiting the economic potential of this country and leaving millions of people unemployed or underemployed: http://www.amazon.com/The-Rent-Damn-High-ebook/dp/B0078XGJXO http://www.amazon.com/The-Rent-Damn-High-ebook/dp/B0078XGJXO If you were to remove many of the laws restricting redevelopment and the construction of tall buildings, everyone would benefit - property owners, property developers, tenants, local stores, rich people, poor people, the government, etc.
- _delirium 13y ago
  Some decent urban planning would help as well. For one thing, SF's public transit is poor, it has too many cars, and its bike infrastructure is poor. It should take 15 minutes to get from the Sunset to SoMA by subway, but it takes an hour by antiquated streetcar. And if you try to bike it, you're constantly stopping at lights and sharing streets with cars, instead of on a proper bikeway. Compare Copenhagen for an example of how to do it better. Also, some more integrated policies would help; the ridiculous fragmentation of municipal governments and transit districts doesn't improve the situation. Why are BART, Muni, Caltrain, AC Transit, and the VTA run in such an uncoordinated manner? Why doesn't BART go down the peninsula? Why are there miles of light rail in the middle of nowhere in Santa Clara County, but not in more dense areas? Why is there no higher-density housing near the Caltrain stations in places like Palo Alto?
bcoates 13y ago
The root of the problem is the tension of interests between the landlords who gain from an increase in property values, even if it prices out current residents, and the residents who have perverse incentives to make their area a worse place to live to keep out the yuppies. Maybe you could securitize the value of the tenant's rent control, entitling an exiting tenant to a windfall if they are replaced by a higher-rent paying replacement? This would be on the theory that residential property values are an externality created by the people living there.
- uvdiv 13y ago
  Maybe you could securitize the value of the tenant's rent control, entitling an exiting tenant to a windfall if they are replaced by a higher-rent paying replacement? Can you clarify how this is different from simply prohibiting rental, forcing residents to own their apartment? A securitized right to property value increases sounds a lot like equity. edit: Oh I'm stupid. Clearly you mean all of this under price control: the renter gets the benefits of equity, without paying anything for them, and without taking on any risk of ownership (like property values collapsing). A complete soup of misincentives and disaster.
  - bcoates 13y ago
    "Securitize" was the wrong word for me to use, as no uninvolved third party is coming into the picture. The difference between owning and renting is already a matter of degrees, particularly once you add rent control, mortgages, condos and HOAs into the mix. The renter already has the right to deprive the owner of the property value increase, this is just creating a legal framework to give it back for cash. I'm imagining it would only be part of the value of increase in rent over the rent-control limit, not all of it. It would increase market price rents modestly, as you're essentially depriving landlords of the power to shake off bad tenants by finding rent control loopholes or waiting them out, but you could offset that by creating a process for voluntary tenant buyouts. Buyouts are currently very difficult to carry out legally even if the tenant wants to leave and the landlord would rather replace them with someone paying more, leaving the two parties stuck together in an unhappy marriage as an unintended side effect of the way the laws work. In response to your edit: Of course you'd pay for them, new rentals are market-priced (then locked into rent control until that tenant leaves), aren't they? It's got one-sided risk like any option but those aren't hard to price. It's in everyone's interest to increase the future value of the rental unit.

ChuckMcM 13y ago

"Cheap grocery stores and eateries have been going out of business, while trendy bars and cafes move in." Probably a moot point but do those new bars and cafes provide jobs? Do these people tip more or less than those who used to frequent the 'Cheap eateries' ? I am sympathetic to the challenges of having a neighborhood go from affordable to "hip" (and not affordable) but does this bring more disposable income into San Francisco and increase the available money supply or not?

slg 13y ago
Yes, these type of transitions improve the neighborhood as a whole including raising wages, but those things happen in the aggregate. Like most economic transitions that means a bunch of individuals suffer while the collective benefits in the long run.
aaronbrethorst 13y ago
I doubt they increased their tipping 29% between 2011 and 2012. Viewing the situation from a distance, it appears that the key issue in SF today is that the Board of Supervisors is unwilling to relax zoning laws[1]. San Francisco obviously can't build out, so the only option is to build up. Until that happens, things will just keep getting worse. [1] http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/11/san_francisco_zoning_needs_more_density_and_tall_buildings.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/11/san_francisco...
- tiredofcareer 13y ago
  The residents who fight tooth and nail against going up and more dense forms of housing are just as much to blame as the BoS. The city could ignore them, yes, but government is about what people want. Most residents of San Francisco -- homeless, tech, lower-income, whatever -- want absolutely nothing to change except for what makes them happier. And in most cases, the loudest, wealthiest, Pac Heights/Sea Cliff voices want the "charm" of San Francisco to stay the same. Meanwhile, it's one of the most undesirable places to merely walk around that I've come across in my life, and I only work in the city because I have to. I will never move to the city. Some of the comments are already popping up on TechCrunch; "do you want SF to be the next NYC?" My answer to that is abso-fucking-lutely. New York City is perfectly suited to dense living without gritting your teeth; the subways run 24/7, the risk of stepping in homeless shit is significantly lower, there are very few places in NYC that make me cringe as much as the TL after sundown, the varying cultures get along and complement each other instead of beating Google Bus piñatas at a dirty-ass BART station... If San Francisco slowly became the next New York City I'd be pleased as a peach. (Imagine NYC with SF's weather!) But it will never happen in our lifetimes. Honestly, I think it's a California thing, because L.A. has a better shot at it and that's not going to happen either.

mc-lovin 13y ago

As someone who generally believes in free markets, I am already unsympathetic to these people. However the venom directed at tech employees strikes me as something more than just economics. People are having a go at nerds because they can. The scales of social status haven't changed since high school, but it turns out that nerds can earn a good salary, and in the "fascist" free market economy, this means they can live where they like, and the police will even protect them! I wish I knew about this so I could show up in my Google sweater.

sp332 13y ago
There's a difference between free-market economics and saying that poorer people don't deserve a voice in local government because they don't have money. I don't believe a particular public sidewalk should get preferential treatment just because richer people walk on it.
- mc-lovin 13y ago
  How do poorer people lack a voice in local government? It seems to me their issue is that they want to extend their control over local affairs far beyond what is their right. It is simply not the right of local residents to determine what kind of person gets to live in that neighborhood. This was a block "party" to make a very specific kind of person feel unwelcome. And then they think of themselves as oppressed when the police break it up.
  - markdown 13y ago
    > How do poorer people lack a voice in local government? ... And then they think of themselves as oppressed when the police break it up. Police breaking up a non-violent protest of only 40 people... yes, that's the definition of oppression. I don't like what you have to say so I'll shut you up is oppression. Have you ever read your constitution? These people are douchebags, but what they were doing should not have been stopped.
    - mc-lovin 13y ago

eeeeaaii 13y ago

"Funding some local education or beautification initiatives could go a long way to reducing the gentrification backlash." Or maybe California could relax its constitutional restriction on city and county income taxes, which would make much more sense than relying on random benefactors to make the city more livable.

lsb 13y ago

I'll consider land use complaints from Miwok and Ohlone, but I'm not sure how "my neighborhood is different from how it was 15 years ago" is a valid concern. A vibrant city can't be a museum.

lambdacat 13y ago
The issue is who is affected by changes to the city. It is always the poor and underprivileged who are pushed to the periphery by the privileged. Change should be shaped in ways that don't involuntarily displace people.

rayiner 13y ago

Rents wouldn't be going up so fast if these protestors were protesting draconian building and zoning laws instead of Google employees. NIMBY-ism hurts lower income people first.

subsystem 13y ago
Do you have anything to back that up? I would imagine that most lower income people have already been hit and preserving status quo might be in the interest of anyone who has managed to stay. At least in the short run.
- rayiner 13y ago
  Rent control drives up rents for everyone who isn't in a rent controlled apartment. Those higher rents affect the young guy working at Starbucks, who is unlikely to have a rent controlled apartment, before it affects the young guy who works at Google, who is also unlikely to have a rent controlled apartment but can at least better afford the resulting rent increases.

ryanobjc 13y ago

I wonder how many commenters here actually live in SF or know anything about it... San Francisco has one of the most tenant friendly laws in the entire country. Rent control is very strict, and the whole "rent has gone up by X%" ... well it has gone up no more than 1% for existing tenants. Because that is the legal limit. New units are not subject to rent control, but if you don't move, then you will never really pay much more for rent. People in my building pay 50% what I pay for the same layout, and new people will probably pay 2x what I am paying for the same layout as well. Commercial property tho doesnt have rent control however. But that's kind of a different argument, right?

MattLaroche 13y ago
Rent control is only on buildings over 35 years old, and not when one rents a condo directly from its owner. There's other rules, but it's very much not "no more than 1% for existing tenants." Many, many people are rent controlled, but it is not everyone.
tptacek 13y ago
Rent control doesn't apply to single-family homes or new construction (anything built after 1979, according to SFTU). And owners can get around rent control, for instance by using owner move-in evictions.
raldi 13y ago
> Commercial property tho doesnt have rent control however. But they still generally pay far, far less property tax than they should: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(1978)#Effects_on_commercial_property_owners http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(1978...
old-gregg 13y ago
> San Francisco has one of the most tenant friendly laws in the entire country What? SF is infested by rent-controlled buildings. Rent control is the most tenant-hostile policy ever invented. It basically means that newcomers (or people who had to move) are subsidizing ridiculous rents of those who haven't moved in a while. Rent control restricts the freedom of movement. My barber pays $1600 for a 2br apartment two blocks from the my building where a shitty 1br got rented within an hour after showing up on craigslist. The very same 1br was $2,400 just a year ago, and $2,200 two years ago.

grbalaffa 13y ago

Anybody else watch the video? There were at least as many cops as protestors present. It's eerily reminiscent of those pictures from OWS where the cops were lined up outside banks.

jurassic 13y ago
Tax dollars at work!
gyardley 13y ago
Sure, but in both cases that's because when there aren't as many cops, these protests result in widespread property damage. This has unfortunately been the case since the WTO protests in Seattle in late 1999.
thrownaway2424 13y ago
The protest is right across the street from the cop shop.
beatpanda 13y ago
Yeah, look, given the organizers, I am shocked there weren't a bunch of fires in the streets last night. So from a distance the police presence looks like overkill, and I am no fan of the police in general, but they had every reason to believe the event yesterday was going to turn violent.

modarts 13y ago

Why are tech employees and companies the getting the blame for increased rent? Last I checked it was the property owners and landlords who control that. How far back do they want to go? Protesting in front of Tim Berners-Lee's house for being an enabling force in the creation of the technology that runs Google and other companies?

natrius 13y ago
Property owners and landlords will charge the highest rent they can convince someone to pay, so treating them as active agents in this scenario doesn't seem useful to me. Supply and demand determine what people are willing to pay for housing, and tech workers are willing to pay a lot.

magicalist 13y ago

> As a three-year resident of the Mission, I’ve seen the influx of money from the rise of Apple and Google’s stock plus the Facebook IPO change its character. It seems weird for the writer to try to separate himself from this. The mission starting gentrifying well before 2010, there was just a bit of a lull at the end of the last decade. Not to put too fine a point on it, but he's a white stanford-grad who covers the tech industry for a website. Even if you're a poor recent college graduate with five roommates, your presence changes the character of the neighborhood.

GuiA 13y ago
Of course, but he's writing an article about the underdogs; naturally he'd rather identify with them :)

navyrain 13y ago

The core problem here is that high-earners are being concentrated in one area. If the Google employes weren't expected to commute to a computer, and were free to remote in from anywhere, their economic impact on their neighborhoods would be distributed, rather than concentrated in a couple locations.

Steko 13y ago
Actually, the core problem is out of control zoning restrictions. Recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5651918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5651918
- thrownaway2424 13y ago
  To be clear, the out-of-control things belong to governments outside SF, SJ, and Oak. The three major cities continue to add housing at a fair clip, as they have for the last 15 years.
jopof 13y ago
Google/Facebook employees don't work anywhere near SF. They live in SF because it's hip, and endure huge commutes (on the comfy buses) to do so. Maybe if G/F stopped subsidizing ridiculous commutes with the comfy buses, employees would live in the low-cost housing areas near campus.
- philsnow 13y ago
  > low-cost housing areas near campus. "relatively". relatively low-cost housing areas. Also, it's not a comparable living experience at all. Mountain View is bikeable, sure, but it's not walkable.
- redcircle 13y ago
  Do you mean East Palo Alto, or the whole valley? There is almost no housing supply in the valley. I have the feeling that engineers are now priced out of the market in the valley. Houses sell to bidders that offer no contingencies, cash, and a price that exceeds a lender's appraisal.

akkartik 13y ago

I showed a friend this, and he pointed out the awesome quasi-gonzo http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n03/rebecca-solnit/diary http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n03/rebecca-solnit/diary.

mturmon 13y ago
It's a nice outsider article. Funny-because-it-hurts: "All these youngish people are on the Google Bus because they want to live in San Francisco, city of promenading and mingling, but they seem as likely to rub these things out as to participate in them." Earlier HN discussion, studiously failing to appreciate the piece: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5189580 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5189580

jstalin 13y ago

I bet more regulations will fix it.

racecar789 13y ago

I can understand the outrage these displaced people feel. Especially for the hard working lower class. It is not displacement for a public works project. It is pure class displacement with a rub-it-in-their-face quality about it.

tzs 13y ago

Are Google/Facebook/Apple employees living in that neighborhood because the company shuttle buses make it convenient, or did the companies start sending shuttles there because so many employees live there?

flatfilefan 13y ago

Yuppies and Gentrification are antonims in my book. Does the author know what those words mean?