7 ms·

S.F. tech companies' civic image at stake as backlash grows

55 points by timr 13y ago

Crito 13y ago
People have been hating yuppies since as long as the concept has existed. This is nothing new at all; it is standard distrust, fear, or dislike of people who are perceived as different. There exists a certain segment of the population that will always consider newcomers (less charitably called 'outsiders') as an intrinsically bad thing. These people should be ignored; they cannot be satisfied by doing anything but giving in to them. (I don't live in SF, but I hear the same complaints about "techies" in my city, particularly in my neighborhood.)
- nilkn 13y ago
  I think it has more to do with being displaced and less with disliking people with Macbooks at coffee houses. This is gentrification, but it's the middle class being pushed out this time, not the lower class. Nobody wants to leave their favorite spot because they can no longer afford the rent. You're right, though, that it's not new at all. This happens in most major urban cities.
  - Crito 13y ago
    The trick is that the newcomers are always blamed for rising housing costs, nobody considers that their own community may be to blame for the housing shortage. It is unreasonable to expect your community to never grow in population or wealth. Also, I think you are underplaying the degree to which "disliking people with Macbooks at coffee houses" plays into it. There is a lot of wordage in that article dedicated to describing things other than rising rent that is bothering the "natives". One example: ""Your whole social world is tech," Garcia, 37, said as he finished a bagel sandwich at the Creamery, a cafe at Fourth and Townsend that's a hotbed of tech deal making. "The reality is that there are real people in San Francisco, but they're usually in neighborhoods like the Richmond or Sunset," he continued. "The wall between them and us, so to speak - not to get too postcolonial about it here - is pretty high."" Here the "native" has decided that "tech people" are somehow less "real" because they are unlike him. People like Garcia might try to dress up their issue with "tech people" as merely a matter of rent and economics, but what it really boils down to is bigotry.
    - timr 13y ago
      Yes, exactly. A lot of the folks in this scene are just unlikable people. I'm "part of the problem", and even I don't like a lot of the startup people who I encounter on a daily basis in SOMA or the Mission. If I have to put it into words, there's been a tangible shift from "let's do something interesting together with this cool new thing" to "how can I get rich with this thing?", and that transition makes everyone else feel like a tool for your personal advancement.
      - michaelochurch 13y ago
        If I have to put it into words, there's been a tangible shift from "let's do something interesting together with this cool new thing" to "how can I get rich with this thing?", and that transition makes everyone else feel like a tool for your personal advancement. Yes, exactly. You're hitting it right on the head in this thread.
      - Crito 13y ago
        Every group has their fair share of unlikeable individual. It is the act of a bigot to confuse those unlikeable individuals as representatives of their group.
        timr 13y ago
        Like it or not, everyone is a representative for whatever scene they're in. We're all ambassadors, and in this case, we're ambassadors for an industry that is easy to characterize as heartless and imperious.
        Crito 13y ago
        Are you comfortable expanding that concept to concepts other than "profession"?
    - dnr 13y ago
      You read that backwards: Garcia is a tech person, and is being self-deprecating when he refers to them as less real people. Whether it's ironic self-deprecation, or sincere sadness and disappointment at the situation, I can't tell.
- objclxt 13y ago
  This is true, and many of the problems I see in SF had like-for-like counterparts when I was living in London (replace 'tech' with 'finance', etc). That said, I think SF has some unique circumstances that make gentrification challenging. These cause genuine problems that aren't related to simple fear of change. A few of those circumstances: * SF has a very poor public transport system that severely limits where people can choose to live in relation to their workplace * SF has problems with homelessness and poverty that are more visible and proportionally higher than its peers (SF has one of the highest rates of homeless people who actively refuse shelter) * Tech workers often flee the city to have families, meaning they aren't as engaged with the community as others (this exodus also has detrimental effects on the school system in SF)
  - redwood 13y ago
    It's sad though, to think that tech could ever be considered the new finance. We're supposed to the LSD experimenting, sandal wearing, authority deriding rebels. That's why we're rooted in San Francisco to begin with. We're threatening our own existence.
    - eshvk 13y ago
      > We're supposed to the LSD experimenting, sandal wearing, authority deriding rebels. > We're threatening our own existence. Erm...no. You are choosing to define tech as either " LSD experimenting, sandal wearing, authority deriding rebels." or in another post as "autistic male industry.". This is a definition that works for you. I choose not to be associated with any of these definitions. I have no interest in either craft beer or comicon or any of those typical American nerd past times. Hell, I studied high school in a sub culture where girls were automatically supposed to be good at Math or CS. My point is that it ultimately is just a job. Go do the job. There will be people who will stereotype you and make you part of some club whether you choose to be part of that club or not. Ignore them, help the world if you choose to.
      - redwood 13y ago
        I couldn't agree with you more. We need to step up and change the averages of this industry. There will be many benefits if we do, for our society, for our industry, and for us too. In the meantime, you and I will be in the minority. I was speaking a bit tongue in cheek about the lsd and sandals, but nevertheless believe we need to work hard to encourage a quilt of diversity: in style and scenes, approaches to the world and epistemology of learning, academic pursuit, politics, local business etc. I aimed to identify the low hanging fruit, where we're most of out to lunch. And the lack of women in our midst is certainly #1 on the list, imo.
objclxt 13y ago
I think - and this is only based on my own experiences, so please do correct me - is that a lot of the problems discussed here are exacerbated by the effective geographical segregation of tech workers with families and those without. One of the complaints here is that in the Mission tech workers aren't engaging with the local community - schools, playgrounds, and the like. But this isn't a general problem with tech, because if you walk 10 minutes to Noe Valley you'll find many tech workers actively involved in their communities because they have families that live there. This is compounded by the fact that many people in tech who decide to start a family will often move out to the valley to take advantage of better schools, and more appropriate housing.
- timr 13y ago
  "One of the complaints here is that in the Mission tech workers aren't engaging with the local community - schools, playgrounds, and the like. But this isn't a general problem with tech, because if you walk 10 minutes to Noe Valley you'll find many tech workers actively involved in their communities because they have families that live there." I'm not really sure about that. SF hasn't exactly been a family-friendly place for the time that I've lived here, and I wouldn't describe the giant packs of 20-something, nerdy men who have come with this latest gold rush as engaged members of their community. But Noe is definitely a different neighborhood than SOMA, so you probably see more civic engagement there than elsewhere in the city. However, I can say with 100% confidence that the city has become less interesting and more homogenous since 2008 -- much more white, 20-something and hipstnerd. Many of the things that I found culturally interesting in San Francisco have been pushed out by the skyrocketing costs of living here. Artisan drop coffee and bougie grilled cheese shops aside, Oakland seems like a far more interesting place than San Francisco these days -- nearly all of the art, music and counter-culture that made SF dynamic has moved to the east bay, replaced by a shallow, consumeristic version of the same.
  - wozniacki 13y ago
    However, I can say with 100% confidence that the city has become less interesting and more homogenous since 2008. Many of the things that I found culturally interesting in San Francisco have been pushed out by the skyrocketing costs of living here. Could you perhaps list a few of these "culturally interesting" things that existed in the pre-2008 period? Because I am left puzzled as to what was so vibrant back then. I have lived on and off in the Bay Are since 2001 and in SF since 2005 (in Potrero ,Lower Nob not Tender-Nob. Hell no! Not Tender-Nob. If you think it is a cesspool now, you should have seen it back then). Whenever I read "culturally interesting", alarm bells go off because it is usually a couched way of culture peddlers saying, culturally interesting to us - the few dozen scenesters who are so firmly ensconced in this made-up brand of stylized misfitdom. These non-tech scene people whose coolness is threatened by the addition of new recruits (and heaven forbid they be upwardly mobile technology workers) that they actively shun all outsiders, who are trying to be "more involved in city life" and "start participating in city life." When they say that we should be "more involved in city life", what they really mean is that you should fork over more of your hard earned dollars to preserve the culturally attractive blight and color of the city, so that they could continue to make merry, uninterrupted while we sit on the outside, looking in, but never really welcomed or accepted.
eshvk 13y ago
I think the most hilarious backlash is the one from folks who moved here barely three years ago. Apparently, if you don't work in tech, you are somehow more of a real person and keeping it real. Bull fucking shit.
- smtddr 13y ago
  The issue is tech-salaries are so high these days, that the once decently priced apartments of SF are now increasing beyond what their non-tech jobs can support. So even the Starbucks employee who moved into SF 2 months ago is always wondering how long he can afford to be there.
  - stefan_kendall 13y ago
    I'm not sure a starbucks employee could have afforded to live in SF for the past several years.
lbrandy 13y ago
Say what you want about tech-workers sense of entitlement, or the local's misdirected anger, but I think we can all agree that this nonsense is great for sfgate's page views. And they clearly know it. They just keep publishing the same two stories over and over. edit to add: I want a media backlash. That always comes, right? Maybe then we can get away from this nonsense narrative of tech-workers vs locals and focus on the actual problems at the root of housing prices.
- loceng 13y ago
  If someone have a similar need or problem then someone taking lead to stir up a conversation and anger about an issue - why not? It's only really a problem when there are lies being stated, which I have no idea if there are.
- larrys 13y ago
  "I want a media backlash" The "story about the story" doesn't come until the story is rehashed and played out many many times. Milked until the only thing to talk about is the coverage itself. (I know nothing about this subject so I am not weighing in with agreement or disagreement - only pointing out how stories play out in the press not what you are actually saying.)
- timr 13y ago
  "I think we can all agree that this nonsense is great for sfgate's page views. And they clearly know it. They just keep publishing the same two stories over and over." Don't know about that, but I do know this: for every article about the tech backlash, there's a top-rated HN comment dismissing the whole thing as a cheap ploy for page views.
  - lbrandy 13y ago
    > for every article about the tech backlash, there's a top-rated HN comment dismissing... That's not even a little true. > ...dismissing the whole thing as a cheap ploy for page views. Strawman. I didn't dismiss anything. It can be both a real issue and sfgate can be milking it for pageviews. The issue with housing prices (and the gentrification that follows) is most certainly a real issue. And sfgate is most certainly milking it for page views.
zmanji 13y ago
As a visitor to SF I'm having a hard time trying to understand why there is so much anger directed towards 'techies' and not towards the city/mayor. Isn't it the mayor's responsibility to ensure that housing supply can meet demand and low income earners are not pushed out of the city entirely?
- drpgq 13y ago
  That's pretty much an impossible task.
- ams6110 13y ago
  No, that is not the mayor's job at all. Well it shouldn't be. If a mayor tries to make it his job, he'll fail because things like "housing supply" cannot be managed by government.
  - zmanji 13y ago
    Doesn't the city effectively control housing supply by issuing permits for new buildings and controlling zoning boundaries? I can see how the city cannot produce new housing but it seems they can definitely restrict housing supply.
    - hindsightbias 13y ago
      There is no more acreage in the Mission. I'm all for bulldozing it and building 900 foot towers as soon as downtown Palo Alto does.
  - jw_ 13y ago
    Governments set rules which directly affect markets - housing in particular is subject to tons of planning and manipulation by government. They absolutely can change supply. Want to bring on more high-density housing? Change zoning rules so it is easier to get permits. Housing regulations tend to be extremely local and I'm not a SF resident, but it is stunningly naive to claim that "housing supply" cannot be influenced by government. I realize Americans love to hate them, but city planning is one thing that governments are actually really helpful to have manage.
yresnob 13y ago
I am an avid volunteer in the community..i am In the tech industry..live near the mission....my wife works for a non profit.. gotta love these generalizations...
rhizome 13y ago
Since when do tech companies, SF or otherwise, even have a "civic image?" This seems like a bald-faced strawman by SFGate. "Future of SFGate-funded action-sports TV sitcom in doubt."
redwood 13y ago
It's not just yuppie hatred, nor does the article really address the big issues. Obviously inequality of money and opportunity is a big part of this. But that can be mitigated if society's fabric isn't threatened. There are elephants in the room: 1) lack of women in the industry <--- means an increasingly out of whack male:female ratio in the city which has many problematic pile-on effects. 2) simple feelings of being left out...that's what people don't like about Google shuttles. They're mysterious. Let people in them, see what they are, see how they're really not that amazing or great: but then that would hurt recruiting. 3) Arrogance of many tech workers: anti-social intercommunication skills etc. We all know this is undeniably true. Sure we may be nicer than most finance types. But are we more out-going? Do we try to connect with our community on an emotional level? Certainly not more than most, and I'd argue a heck of a lot less than most.
- redwood 13y ago
  To add to (3): we really miss the mark when it comes to trying to connect with other people's issues. Not everyone can fix their problems by "learning to code" nor does everyone want to use our binary lingo of "problems and solutions" to describe the world. We're far less interested in genuinely understanding others than in attributing our suggestions for improvement. Ultimately this ties back to (1). We're essentially an autistic male industry.
- eshvk 13y ago
  > 2) simple feelings of being left out...that's what people don't like about Google shuttles. They're mysterious. Let people in them, see what they are, see how they're really not that amazing or great: but then that would hurt recruiting. So your proposal is that people who don't work in tech, say someone who spend upwards of $100000 on an expensive liberal arts education and has a good sense for making good soundbites but not enough money should be allowed to enter the Google bus and drive down to the South Bay and back? It is a fucking bus that moves from point A to point B. There will be people who will hate you for anything you do. Always.
  - redwood 13y ago
    I'm saying show people the interior on a "google bus open house day in the mission" so the google bus isn't like a red velvet rope and bouncer protected nightclub --- looks pretty fancy from the outside, but not much really going on inside. Disambiguify it and say "we're not trying to be a bunch of nightclub bouncers... we just have a large car pool"
md224 13y ago
Another commenter here notes that "People have been hating yuppies since as long as the concept has existed" but as a yuppie myself, this misses something more crucial to me: the disconnect between the techno-utopian ideology of the bay area and the (apparently?) increasing divide between haves/have-nots. Something about the juxtaposition just really troubles me. Of course, there are larger social trends happening here that complicate the picture, such as a shift in the distribution of poverty between urban and suburban areas: http://www.brookings.edu/research/books/2013/confrontingsuburbanpovertyinamerica http://www.brookings.edu/research/books/2013/confrontingsubu... There are people who say that it's okay because these technologies of convenience will eventually become affordable for everyone, essentially a trickle-down theory of technological progress. Maybe that's true. I just want to avoid an Elysium-like scenario of futuristic enclaves surrounded by poverty-stricken shantytowns. As long as we can avoid that, I'll be much happier about building the future.
- mynameishere 13y ago
  Elysium-like scenario of futuristic Jokes on you. Like most dystopian works, Elysium was about the present day. Those enclaves are already in almost every country.
ChristianMarks 13y ago
There is something to this apparent lack of reflection around technology. See the 3AM Magazine interview with Peter Ludlow: http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/what-the-hell-are-we-doing-here/ http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/what-the-hell-are-we-doing-he... I wouldn't mind having the job title of “thinking about what the hell we are doing here.” Perhaps Hired is holding an auction for this very position.
10098 13y ago
> ...and she wants them to "start participating in city life". That sentence really confused me. Like, what does it even mean, to be participating in city life?
- eshvk 13y ago
  No idea really. I know quite a bunch of people who live in SF and do the South Bay trip. Enough of them spend money in the city, walk dogs for the elderly and so on. I think we are getting into "No true scotsman" territory with all this misplaced outrage.
- Crito 13y ago
  It means that she thinks anyone who does not have similar interests and hobbies as she does should be run out of the city.
curtis 13y ago
One really serious problem with this particular topic of discussion is that people keep conflating "homeless" and "poor". Homeless people may be almost universally poor, but most of the poor are not homeless. I will go further and venture that most of the homeless are not homeless because they are poor but rather because they are either suffering from either serious mental disorders or substance abuse or both. As a consequence, the ways you solve the "poor" problem and the ways you solve the "homeless" problem are different. So it really makes sense to figure out which particular problem you are talking about.
michaelochurch 13y ago
I don't think most people realize how bad this is. It's not just a rash of bad blood. This is a turning point. The last bubble was much more unreasonable in terms of raw numbers, but it didn't have the mean-spirited aura of this one. Even after 2001, people liked tech and Silicon Valley and wanted to see these ecosystems succeed. That was the respectable way to get rich: to move to the Valley and start a company. No more. Average people hate tech now. The problem is that, as often happens, the wrong targets are being attacked. People are lumping the $140k/year programmers (who'll never be able to afford a house in San Francisco) in with the $250k product executives and useless scene kids working 11-to-3, much less the $2M/year lawyers who figure out how tech companies can never pay a dime in taxes, which means they're not seeing the source of the real problem.
- gruseom 13y ago
  I lived in the Mission (24th and Potrero) for years during the dotcom bubble, when I was a grad student. Gentrification was just as controversial then as it is now. As for mean-spirited auras, look at the "Mission Yuppie Eradication Project" poster in [1] that begins "Over the past several years the Mission has been colonized by pigs with money" (sounds like a michaelochurch post to me!) and ends by calling for vandalizing their cars. People were upset about different things—instead of Google buses, lofts being converted into luxury condos and so on—but the emotions and the discourse were much the same. I remember a startup called Bigstep that got into hot water because they took over office space from a community org or something that couldn't afford the rent any more [2]. There was a lot of talk about the Latino community being displaced by dotcom types, about Marina yuppies taking over the nightlife—at places like Blowfish Sushi, plus a somehow slightly creepy experiment called Circadia [3] that Starbucks ran at Bryant and Mariposa, which was an emblem of dotcom excess. It's just an ordinary Starbucks now. I haven't noticed any change in how "average" people feel about tech, except perhaps that its status has gone up. One thing that actually has changed from the dotcom bubble to now is the massive shift of power away from VCs and MBAs towards founders and engineers. (Which is kind of ironic since it contradicts almost everything you say about the industry.) Investors have lost power relative to founders and managers have lost power relative to programmers. Both of those trends have been going on for a long time, but have been accelerating. They seem to me to be good trends, arguably even for the investors and managers. Curiously, this shift is visible in the cultural ripples around the dotcoms then vs. the startups now. The dotcom bubble produced a lot of ersatz culture that matched its mostly ersatz startups. The parts of it that I saw were douchey and suity; a place like Circadia, which I mentioned above, was an expression of that. It was full of people who weren't actually working on anything. The decor was lavish, but the coffee and food (not that I could afford the food) were mediocre. Compare that to a place like Sightglass now, where the coffee is excellent and most people are working on stuff. Sure they're hipsters, but it's still a crowd I'd rather be around than the one that used to make me squirm back then; and I'm a dyed-in-the-wool programmer type who hasn't much changed. [1] http://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Mission_Yuppie_Eradication_Project http://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Mission_Yuppie_Eradicatio.... Also http://www.uncanny.net/~wetzel/macchron.htm http://www.uncanny.net/~wetzel/macchron.htm and http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2000/03/35154 http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2000/03/35154, and there's lots more where those came from. [2] Googling this turned up http://blog.doubledutch.me/2012/03/the-rise-of-the-mission-startup/ http://blog.doubledutch.me/2012/03/the-rise-of-the-mission-s... which includes some details about anti-dotcom protests in from 1999-2000. [3] https://www.salon.com/1999/01/21/feature_238/ https://www.salon.com/1999/01/21/feature_238/. I sometimes worked on my thesis there because they had internet. Most of their tech-oriented image was silly, though. The place was all pretense.
rmrfrmrf 13y ago
The problem is a climate that is conducive to the homeless. Here's my modest proposal: move tech companies to the rust belt. From Detroit to Utica, we have the pleasure of watching the homeless die of hypothermia every winter. Every time I see some begging scumbag on the street, I just think to myself, "thank FSM that piece of shit will have a shallow grave in 6 months." You know, because he can't afford to get put 6 feet under. Natural selection is a beautiful thing.
- sharemywin 13y ago
  when you troll please at least put a little effort into the craft.
kenster07 13y ago
Is SFGate a tabloid? Step 1: Cherry-pick most extreme comments possible and imply that they represent the average opinion. Step 2: Make numerous anecdotal assertions without any effort to back them in statistics. Step 3: Instigate mudslinging by displaying cherry-pickings to other side. Step 4: Feedback into Step 1. "Since we don't understand the macroeconomic system that is causing these issues, let's just blame a random group of people who are doing well in said system."
ChrisNorstrom 13y ago
I feel like Tech is the scapegoat for San Francisco's pre-existing problems. It's pretty obvious by now San Francisco is one of the worst places for a fast growing tech industry. They don't want change, it's a tiny peninsula (I've walked from one end to the other), there's not enough land, taxes are high, traffic is awful, transportation is apparently awful, they're overly bureaucratic, their politics are broken (all things I've heard directly from SF natives and expats), prices and living expenses are the highest in the USA, the community is volatile towards the businesses there (compare SF to St. Louis & other cities who are passing incentive packages worth $1+ Billion just to get Boeing to bring 8,000 jobs to their city). The city looks unique, hip and trendy, and just like Vogue has more issues than anyone can count. They're complaining about gentrification as if it's the worst thing in the world. Meanwhile in St. Louis, we're all praying for gentrification. When neighborhoods become run down and violent no one says anything, everyone just moves away. When those same people move back to fix everything up suddenly they're the villain. In St. Louis, the poor just move to a cheaper place in a nicer house using the money they got from their fixer-upper home. That's something SF natives can't really do because of SF's land size problem. I've spoken to African Americans and minorities who took part in gentrification just above Martin Luther King street and bought homes to fix them up. The world operates in much more rational, logical ways outside of the hipster-bubble. If silicon valley moves, who will SF blame their problems on then? Pretend that Silicon Valley never existed in the bay area. Would A-N-Y of San Francisco's major problems be solved? They'd still have busted transportation, still have high rent, the politics would still be the same, they'd still ignore Oakland residents, still have a lack of housing, still have the homeless problem, and everything else. This is just another re-occurring pattern in human nature: "Blame your problems on those who have nice things."

55 points by timr 13y ago

Crito 13y ago

People have been hating yuppies since as long as the concept has existed. This is nothing new at all; it is standard distrust, fear, or dislike of people who are perceived as different. There exists a certain segment of the population that will always consider newcomers (less charitably called 'outsiders') as an intrinsically bad thing. These people should be ignored; they cannot be satisfied by doing anything but giving in to them. (I don't live in SF, but I hear the same complaints about "techies" in my city, particularly in my neighborhood.)

nilkn 13y ago
I think it has more to do with being displaced and less with disliking people with Macbooks at coffee houses. This is gentrification, but it's the middle class being pushed out this time, not the lower class. Nobody wants to leave their favorite spot because they can no longer afford the rent. You're right, though, that it's not new at all. This happens in most major urban cities.
- Crito 13y ago
  The trick is that the newcomers are always blamed for rising housing costs, nobody considers that their own community may be to blame for the housing shortage. It is unreasonable to expect your community to never grow in population or wealth. Also, I think you are underplaying the degree to which "disliking people with Macbooks at coffee houses" plays into it. There is a lot of wordage in that article dedicated to describing things other than rising rent that is bothering the "natives". One example: ""Your whole social world is tech," Garcia, 37, said as he finished a bagel sandwich at the Creamery, a cafe at Fourth and Townsend that's a hotbed of tech deal making. "The reality is that there are real people in San Francisco, but they're usually in neighborhoods like the Richmond or Sunset," he continued. "The wall between them and us, so to speak - not to get too postcolonial about it here - is pretty high."" Here the "native" has decided that "tech people" are somehow less "real" because they are unlike him. People like Garcia might try to dress up their issue with "tech people" as merely a matter of rent and economics, but what it really boils down to is bigotry.
  - timr 13y ago
    Yes, exactly. A lot of the folks in this scene are just unlikable people. I'm "part of the problem", and even I don't like a lot of the startup people who I encounter on a daily basis in SOMA or the Mission. If I have to put it into words, there's been a tangible shift from "let's do something interesting together with this cool new thing" to "how can I get rich with this thing?", and that transition makes everyone else feel like a tool for your personal advancement.
    - michaelochurch 13y ago
      If I have to put it into words, there's been a tangible shift from "let's do something interesting together with this cool new thing" to "how can I get rich with this thing?", and that transition makes everyone else feel like a tool for your personal advancement. Yes, exactly. You're hitting it right on the head in this thread.
    - Crito 13y ago
      Every group has their fair share of unlikeable individual. It is the act of a bigot to confuse those unlikeable individuals as representatives of their group.
      - timr 13y ago
        Like it or not, everyone is a representative for whatever scene they're in. We're all ambassadors, and in this case, we're ambassadors for an industry that is easy to characterize as heartless and imperious.
        Crito 13y ago
        Are you comfortable expanding that concept to concepts other than "profession"?
  - dnr 13y ago
    You read that backwards: Garcia is a tech person, and is being self-deprecating when he refers to them as less real people. Whether it's ironic self-deprecation, or sincere sadness and disappointment at the situation, I can't tell.
objclxt 13y ago
This is true, and many of the problems I see in SF had like-for-like counterparts when I was living in London (replace 'tech' with 'finance', etc). That said, I think SF has some unique circumstances that make gentrification challenging. These cause genuine problems that aren't related to simple fear of change. A few of those circumstances: * SF has a very poor public transport system that severely limits where people can choose to live in relation to their workplace * SF has problems with homelessness and poverty that are more visible and proportionally higher than its peers (SF has one of the highest rates of homeless people who actively refuse shelter) * Tech workers often flee the city to have families, meaning they aren't as engaged with the community as others (this exodus also has detrimental effects on the school system in SF)
- redwood 13y ago
  It's sad though, to think that tech could ever be considered the new finance. We're supposed to the LSD experimenting, sandal wearing, authority deriding rebels. That's why we're rooted in San Francisco to begin with. We're threatening our own existence.
  - eshvk 13y ago
    > We're supposed to the LSD experimenting, sandal wearing, authority deriding rebels. > We're threatening our own existence. Erm...no. You are choosing to define tech as either " LSD experimenting, sandal wearing, authority deriding rebels." or in another post as "autistic male industry.". This is a definition that works for you. I choose not to be associated with any of these definitions. I have no interest in either craft beer or comicon or any of those typical American nerd past times. Hell, I studied high school in a sub culture where girls were automatically supposed to be good at Math or CS. My point is that it ultimately is just a job. Go do the job. There will be people who will stereotype you and make you part of some club whether you choose to be part of that club or not. Ignore them, help the world if you choose to.
    - redwood 13y ago
      I couldn't agree with you more. We need to step up and change the averages of this industry. There will be many benefits if we do, for our society, for our industry, and for us too. In the meantime, you and I will be in the minority. I was speaking a bit tongue in cheek about the lsd and sandals, but nevertheless believe we need to work hard to encourage a quilt of diversity: in style and scenes, approaches to the world and epistemology of learning, academic pursuit, politics, local business etc. I aimed to identify the low hanging fruit, where we're most of out to lunch. And the lack of women in our midst is certainly #1 on the list, imo.

objclxt 13y ago

I think - and this is only based on my own experiences, so please do correct me - is that a lot of the problems discussed here are exacerbated by the effective geographical segregation of tech workers with families and those without. One of the complaints here is that in the Mission tech workers aren't engaging with the local community - schools, playgrounds, and the like. But this isn't a general problem with tech, because if you walk 10 minutes to Noe Valley you'll find many tech workers actively involved in their communities because they have families that live there. This is compounded by the fact that many people in tech who decide to start a family will often move out to the valley to take advantage of better schools, and more appropriate housing.

timr 13y ago
"One of the complaints here is that in the Mission tech workers aren't engaging with the local community - schools, playgrounds, and the like. But this isn't a general problem with tech, because if you walk 10 minutes to Noe Valley you'll find many tech workers actively involved in their communities because they have families that live there." I'm not really sure about that. SF hasn't exactly been a family-friendly place for the time that I've lived here, and I wouldn't describe the giant packs of 20-something, nerdy men who have come with this latest gold rush as engaged members of their community. But Noe is definitely a different neighborhood than SOMA, so you probably see more civic engagement there than elsewhere in the city. However, I can say with 100% confidence that the city has become less interesting and more homogenous since 2008 -- much more white, 20-something and hipstnerd. Many of the things that I found culturally interesting in San Francisco have been pushed out by the skyrocketing costs of living here. Artisan drop coffee and bougie grilled cheese shops aside, Oakland seems like a far more interesting place than San Francisco these days -- nearly all of the art, music and counter-culture that made SF dynamic has moved to the east bay, replaced by a shallow, consumeristic version of the same.
- wozniacki 13y ago
  However, I can say with 100% confidence that the city has become less interesting and more homogenous since 2008. Many of the things that I found culturally interesting in San Francisco have been pushed out by the skyrocketing costs of living here. Could you perhaps list a few of these "culturally interesting" things that existed in the pre-2008 period? Because I am left puzzled as to what was so vibrant back then. I have lived on and off in the Bay Are since 2001 and in SF since 2005 (in Potrero ,Lower Nob not Tender-Nob. Hell no! Not Tender-Nob. If you think it is a cesspool now, you should have seen it back then). Whenever I read "culturally interesting", alarm bells go off because it is usually a couched way of culture peddlers saying, culturally interesting to us - the few dozen scenesters who are so firmly ensconced in this made-up brand of stylized misfitdom. These non-tech scene people whose coolness is threatened by the addition of new recruits (and heaven forbid they be upwardly mobile technology workers) that they actively shun all outsiders, who are trying to be "more involved in city life" and "start participating in city life." When they say that we should be "more involved in city life", what they really mean is that you should fork over more of your hard earned dollars to preserve the culturally attractive blight and color of the city, so that they could continue to make merry, uninterrupted while we sit on the outside, looking in, but never really welcomed or accepted.

eshvk 13y ago

I think the most hilarious backlash is the one from folks who moved here barely three years ago. Apparently, if you don't work in tech, you are somehow more of a real person and keeping it real. Bull fucking shit.

smtddr 13y ago
The issue is tech-salaries are so high these days, that the once decently priced apartments of SF are now increasing beyond what their non-tech jobs can support. So even the Starbucks employee who moved into SF 2 months ago is always wondering how long he can afford to be there.
- stefan_kendall 13y ago
  I'm not sure a starbucks employee could have afforded to live in SF for the past several years.

lbrandy 13y ago

Say what you want about tech-workers sense of entitlement, or the local's misdirected anger, but I think we can all agree that this nonsense is great for sfgate's page views. And they clearly know it. They just keep publishing the same two stories over and over. edit to add: I want a media backlash. That always comes, right? Maybe then we can get away from this nonsense narrative of tech-workers vs locals and focus on the actual problems at the root of housing prices.

loceng 13y ago
If someone have a similar need or problem then someone taking lead to stir up a conversation and anger about an issue - why not? It's only really a problem when there are lies being stated, which I have no idea if there are.
larrys 13y ago
"I want a media backlash" The "story about the story" doesn't come until the story is rehashed and played out many many times. Milked until the only thing to talk about is the coverage itself. (I know nothing about this subject so I am not weighing in with agreement or disagreement - only pointing out how stories play out in the press not what you are actually saying.)
timr 13y ago
"I think we can all agree that this nonsense is great for sfgate's page views. And they clearly know it. They just keep publishing the same two stories over and over." Don't know about that, but I do know this: for every article about the tech backlash, there's a top-rated HN comment dismissing the whole thing as a cheap ploy for page views.
- lbrandy 13y ago
  > for every article about the tech backlash, there's a top-rated HN comment dismissing... That's not even a little true. > ...dismissing the whole thing as a cheap ploy for page views. Strawman. I didn't dismiss anything. It can be both a real issue and sfgate can be milking it for pageviews. The issue with housing prices (and the gentrification that follows) is most certainly a real issue. And sfgate is most certainly milking it for page views.

zmanji 13y ago

As a visitor to SF I'm having a hard time trying to understand why there is so much anger directed towards 'techies' and not towards the city/mayor. Isn't it the mayor's responsibility to ensure that housing supply can meet demand and low income earners are not pushed out of the city entirely?

drpgq 13y ago
That's pretty much an impossible task.
ams6110 13y ago
No, that is not the mayor's job at all. Well it shouldn't be. If a mayor tries to make it his job, he'll fail because things like "housing supply" cannot be managed by government.
- zmanji 13y ago
  Doesn't the city effectively control housing supply by issuing permits for new buildings and controlling zoning boundaries? I can see how the city cannot produce new housing but it seems they can definitely restrict housing supply.
  - hindsightbias 13y ago
    There is no more acreage in the Mission. I'm all for bulldozing it and building 900 foot towers as soon as downtown Palo Alto does.
- jw_ 13y ago
  Governments set rules which directly affect markets - housing in particular is subject to tons of planning and manipulation by government. They absolutely can change supply. Want to bring on more high-density housing? Change zoning rules so it is easier to get permits. Housing regulations tend to be extremely local and I'm not a SF resident, but it is stunningly naive to claim that "housing supply" cannot be influenced by government. I realize Americans love to hate them, but city planning is one thing that governments are actually really helpful to have manage.

yresnob 13y ago

I am an avid volunteer in the community..i am In the tech industry..live near the mission....my wife works for a non profit.. gotta love these generalizations...

rhizome 13y ago

Since when do tech companies, SF or otherwise, even have a "civic image?" This seems like a bald-faced strawman by SFGate. "Future of SFGate-funded action-sports TV sitcom in doubt."

redwood 13y ago

It's not just yuppie hatred, nor does the article really address the big issues. Obviously inequality of money and opportunity is a big part of this. But that can be mitigated if society's fabric isn't threatened. There are elephants in the room: 1) lack of women in the industry <--- means an increasingly out of whack male:female ratio in the city which has many problematic pile-on effects. 2) simple feelings of being left out...that's what people don't like about Google shuttles. They're mysterious. Let people in them, see what they are, see how they're really not that amazing or great: but then that would hurt recruiting. 3) Arrogance of many tech workers: anti-social intercommunication skills etc. We all know this is undeniably true. Sure we may be nicer than most finance types. But are we more out-going? Do we try to connect with our community on an emotional level? Certainly not more than most, and I'd argue a heck of a lot less than most.

redwood 13y ago
To add to (3): we really miss the mark when it comes to trying to connect with other people's issues. Not everyone can fix their problems by "learning to code" nor does everyone want to use our binary lingo of "problems and solutions" to describe the world. We're far less interested in genuinely understanding others than in attributing our suggestions for improvement. Ultimately this ties back to (1). We're essentially an autistic male industry.
eshvk 13y ago
> 2) simple feelings of being left out...that's what people don't like about Google shuttles. They're mysterious. Let people in them, see what they are, see how they're really not that amazing or great: but then that would hurt recruiting. So your proposal is that people who don't work in tech, say someone who spend upwards of $100000 on an expensive liberal arts education and has a good sense for making good soundbites but not enough money should be allowed to enter the Google bus and drive down to the South Bay and back? It is a fucking bus that moves from point A to point B. There will be people who will hate you for anything you do. Always.
- redwood 13y ago
  I'm saying show people the interior on a "google bus open house day in the mission" so the google bus isn't like a red velvet rope and bouncer protected nightclub --- looks pretty fancy from the outside, but not much really going on inside. Disambiguify it and say "we're not trying to be a bunch of nightclub bouncers... we just have a large car pool"

md224 13y ago

Another commenter here notes that "People have been hating yuppies since as long as the concept has existed" but as a yuppie myself, this misses something more crucial to me: the disconnect between the techno-utopian ideology of the bay area and the (apparently?) increasing divide between haves/have-nots. Something about the juxtaposition just really troubles me. Of course, there are larger social trends happening here that complicate the picture, such as a shift in the distribution of poverty between urban and suburban areas: http://www.brookings.edu/research/books/2013/confrontingsuburbanpovertyinamerica http://www.brookings.edu/research/books/2013/confrontingsubu... There are people who say that it's okay because these technologies of convenience will eventually become affordable for everyone, essentially a trickle-down theory of technological progress. Maybe that's true. I just want to avoid an Elysium-like scenario of futuristic enclaves surrounded by poverty-stricken shantytowns. As long as we can avoid that, I'll be much happier about building the future.

mynameishere 13y ago
Elysium-like scenario of futuristic Jokes on you. Like most dystopian works, Elysium was about the present day. Those enclaves are already in almost every country.

ChristianMarks 13y ago

There is something to this apparent lack of reflection around technology. See the 3AM Magazine interview with Peter Ludlow: http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/what-the-hell-are-we-doing-here/ http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/what-the-hell-are-we-doing-he... I wouldn't mind having the job title of “thinking about what the hell we are doing here.” Perhaps Hired is holding an auction for this very position.

10098 13y ago

> ...and she wants them to "start participating in city life". That sentence really confused me. Like, what does it even mean, to be participating in city life?

eshvk 13y ago
No idea really. I know quite a bunch of people who live in SF and do the South Bay trip. Enough of them spend money in the city, walk dogs for the elderly and so on. I think we are getting into "No true scotsman" territory with all this misplaced outrage.
Crito 13y ago
It means that she thinks anyone who does not have similar interests and hobbies as she does should be run out of the city.

curtis 13y ago

One really serious problem with this particular topic of discussion is that people keep conflating "homeless" and "poor". Homeless people may be almost universally poor, but most of the poor are not homeless. I will go further and venture that most of the homeless are not homeless because they are poor but rather because they are either suffering from either serious mental disorders or substance abuse or both. As a consequence, the ways you solve the "poor" problem and the ways you solve the "homeless" problem are different. So it really makes sense to figure out which particular problem you are talking about.

michaelochurch 13y ago

I don't think most people realize how bad this is. It's not just a rash of bad blood. This is a turning point. The last bubble was much more unreasonable in terms of raw numbers, but it didn't have the mean-spirited aura of this one. Even after 2001, people liked tech and Silicon Valley and wanted to see these ecosystems succeed. That was the respectable way to get rich: to move to the Valley and start a company. No more. Average people hate tech now. The problem is that, as often happens, the wrong targets are being attacked. People are lumping the $140k/year programmers (who'll never be able to afford a house in San Francisco) in with the $250k product executives and useless scene kids working 11-to-3, much less the $2M/year lawyers who figure out how tech companies can never pay a dime in taxes, which means they're not seeing the source of the real problem.

gruseom 13y ago
I lived in the Mission (24th and Potrero) for years during the dotcom bubble, when I was a grad student. Gentrification was just as controversial then as it is now. As for mean-spirited auras, look at the "Mission Yuppie Eradication Project" poster in [1] that begins "Over the past several years the Mission has been colonized by pigs with money" (sounds like a michaelochurch post to me!) and ends by calling for vandalizing their cars. People were upset about different things—instead of Google buses, lofts being converted into luxury condos and so on—but the emotions and the discourse were much the same. I remember a startup called Bigstep that got into hot water because they took over office space from a community org or something that couldn't afford the rent any more [2]. There was a lot of talk about the Latino community being displaced by dotcom types, about Marina yuppies taking over the nightlife—at places like Blowfish Sushi, plus a somehow slightly creepy experiment called Circadia [3] that Starbucks ran at Bryant and Mariposa, which was an emblem of dotcom excess. It's just an ordinary Starbucks now. I haven't noticed any change in how "average" people feel about tech, except perhaps that its status has gone up. One thing that actually has changed from the dotcom bubble to now is the massive shift of power away from VCs and MBAs towards founders and engineers. (Which is kind of ironic since it contradicts almost everything you say about the industry.) Investors have lost power relative to founders and managers have lost power relative to programmers. Both of those trends have been going on for a long time, but have been accelerating. They seem to me to be good trends, arguably even for the investors and managers. Curiously, this shift is visible in the cultural ripples around the dotcoms then vs. the startups now. The dotcom bubble produced a lot of ersatz culture that matched its mostly ersatz startups. The parts of it that I saw were douchey and suity; a place like Circadia, which I mentioned above, was an expression of that. It was full of people who weren't actually working on anything. The decor was lavish, but the coffee and food (not that I could afford the food) were mediocre. Compare that to a place like Sightglass now, where the coffee is excellent and most people are working on stuff. Sure they're hipsters, but it's still a crowd I'd rather be around than the one that used to make me squirm back then; and I'm a dyed-in-the-wool programmer type who hasn't much changed. [1] http://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Mission_Yuppie_Eradication_Project http://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Mission_Yuppie_Eradicatio.... Also http://www.uncanny.net/~wetzel/macchron.htm http://www.uncanny.net/~wetzel/macchron.htm and http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2000/03/35154 http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2000/03/35154, and there's lots more where those came from. [2] Googling this turned up http://blog.doubledutch.me/2012/03/the-rise-of-the-mission-startup/ http://blog.doubledutch.me/2012/03/the-rise-of-the-mission-s... which includes some details about anti-dotcom protests in from 1999-2000. [3] https://www.salon.com/1999/01/21/feature_238/ https://www.salon.com/1999/01/21/feature_238/. I sometimes worked on my thesis there because they had internet. Most of their tech-oriented image was silly, though. The place was all pretense.

rmrfrmrf 13y ago

The problem is a climate that is conducive to the homeless. Here's my modest proposal: move tech companies to the rust belt. From Detroit to Utica, we have the pleasure of watching the homeless die of hypothermia every winter. Every time I see some begging scumbag on the street, I just think to myself, "thank FSM that piece of shit will have a shallow grave in 6 months." You know, because he can't afford to get put 6 feet under. Natural selection is a beautiful thing.

sharemywin 13y ago
when you troll please at least put a little effort into the craft.

kenster07 13y ago

Is SFGate a tabloid? Step 1: Cherry-pick most extreme comments possible and imply that they represent the average opinion. Step 2: Make numerous anecdotal assertions without any effort to back them in statistics. Step 3: Instigate mudslinging by displaying cherry-pickings to other side. Step 4: Feedback into Step 1. "Since we don't understand the macroeconomic system that is causing these issues, let's just blame a random group of people who are doing well in said system."

ChrisNorstrom 13y ago

I feel like Tech is the scapegoat for San Francisco's pre-existing problems. It's pretty obvious by now San Francisco is one of the worst places for a fast growing tech industry. They don't want change, it's a tiny peninsula (I've walked from one end to the other), there's not enough land, taxes are high, traffic is awful, transportation is apparently awful, they're overly bureaucratic, their politics are broken (all things I've heard directly from SF natives and expats), prices and living expenses are the highest in the USA, the community is volatile towards the businesses there (compare SF to St. Louis & other cities who are passing incentive packages worth $1+ Billion just to get Boeing to bring 8,000 jobs to their city). The city looks unique, hip and trendy, and just like Vogue has more issues than anyone can count. They're complaining about gentrification as if it's the worst thing in the world. Meanwhile in St. Louis, we're all praying for gentrification. When neighborhoods become run down and violent no one says anything, everyone just moves away. When those same people move back to fix everything up suddenly they're the villain. In St. Louis, the poor just move to a cheaper place in a nicer house using the money they got from their fixer-upper home. That's something SF natives can't really do because of SF's land size problem. I've spoken to African Americans and minorities who took part in gentrification just above Martin Luther King street and bought homes to fix them up. The world operates in much more rational, logical ways outside of the hipster-bubble. If silicon valley moves, who will SF blame their problems on then? Pretend that Silicon Valley never existed in the bay area. Would A-N-Y of San Francisco's major problems be solved? They'd still have busted transportation, still have high rent, the politics would still be the same, they'd still ignore Oakland residents, still have a lack of housing, still have the homeless problem, and everything else. This is just another re-occurring pattern in human nature: "Blame your problems on those who have nice things."