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I'm sympathetic to both "sides," although it's unclear to me that there are really sides. No one is actually happy about the rising costs in San Francisco (asid
by scarmig 13y ago
I'm sympathetic to both "sides," although it's unclear to me that there are really sides. No one is actually happy about the rising costs in San Francisco (aside from current owners of real estate), and I've not met anyone who likes that there's effectively a purge going on of lower-income people in the city. Similarly, I think very few people want to ban tech commuters from living in San Francisco and eject the start-ups that already exist here.
It's a perfectly broken system, because it's working exactly as it's supposed to: more economically productive people get more access to scarce resources. No one is individually at fault, but there's an emergent order that is grotesque.
The issue is what should someone upset at this do? The people being priced out obviously can't be reskilled to make their labor worth the amount a Googler gets, and the city is, as far as I can tell, incapable of addressing the problem--someone is doubtlessly going to chime in something about rezoning, but it's simply wishful thinking to think that constructing a couple thousand extra housing units per year would do anything besides maybe slightly slow the increase of housing costs, which are already too high for most people.
Lashing out at the buses is a strategy I'm not particularly impressed with. At best it might incentivize tech companies to figure out how to solve the problem themselves, but that's difficult to see happening, both because it's simultaneously a very hard problem to solve and a problem that will resolve itself--in a way neither I nor the protesters will like much--in less than a decade (at least in San Francisco--Oakland and Berkeley probably have a bit more than a decade).
I've intellectually played around with some fairly radical strategies and solutions--for instance, a high land value tax that's used to fund a basic income for residents--but none of them seem like a slam dunk answer, and all of them can be described, at best, as "maybe not impossible." But I'm incredibly eager for any ideas.
- wpietri 13y agoOne thing that could happen tomorrow: Google and other tech companies could put a lot of muscle behind getting city and regional government to solve some of the planning issues. Especially the planning issues in the cities where they actually have their offices. Part of the reason people are commuting from SF is that vacancy rates in the valley are even worse than here. If Google wants to hire more people, the first step should be making housing available near Google. That may also require going beyond mere bulk construction to make the place more appealing to their workers. The same goes for the other companies that are flush with cash and hiring rapidly. From my perspective, the buses are an ugly hack to temporarily ameliorate a deeper problem. A hack that shifted the impact of the problem to SF.
- crassus 13y agoActivists would flip their shit if Google started throwing their weight around in politics - "Is Google trying to buy your democracy?". And then the NIMBY crowd would swarm all over any proposed building.
- wpietri 13y agoFrom your other posts, you don't strike me as a guy who thinks that companies should be dissuaded by lefty activists flipping their shit, so this seems a little disingenuous to me.
- twiceaday 13y agoYour premise is incorrect. People choose to live in SF because they prefer city life. Building more boxes around the bay will not get these people to move. The buses ARE a temporary solution, but the real solution is to move the work closer to the workers. I also think that it is an entirely over-optimistic point of view that these few tech companies are going to shake a few hands and rents will decrease even when talking about a multi-year time scale.
- wpietri 13y agoSome people choose to live in SF because they prefer city life. But that's another thing that tech-company muscle can help solve: the peninsula doesn't have to be sterile. I'm not talking about a few handshakes. I'm talking about them using their substantial financial and political power to influence the city and regional governments on the peninsula. If you think billion-dollar companies can't influence the areas where they are based, you haven't been paying any attention to local US politics.
- lotu 13y agoThere is zero chance of making more housing available in Mountain View. No one who currently lives in Mountain View want or would benefit for an increase in density.
- 13y ago