11 ms·

Inside San Francisco's housing crisis

90 points by dthal 12y ago

delluminatus 12y ago
Loading extremely slowly for me. Google cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6m1opfxYLn0J:www.vox.com/a/homeless-san-francisco-tech-boom https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6m1opf... After reading the article, this quote really jumped out at me: "I was going along, being a good citizen," Todd, now 52 years old, says. "I was a volunteer firefighter, I coached football and baseball, I was saving my money, doing everything you're supposed to do, being a single father, raising my daughter by myself. Then the economy just went to hell and the company threw me to the wolves." This is interesting because it sounds like what I've come to think of as the "salaryman" mentality: the idea that there is a contract between employee and company help each other, forever. I don't want to say it implies entitlement, exactly, but more like a weird view of reality. Why do people think being a "good citizen" who "does everything you're supposed to do" means nothing will ever screw them? Or is this just rhetoric that people use to make themselves sound victimized? I think this is a generational gap (in America, anyway). I don't think you would ever hear those words coming from a millennial. Maybe we've just learned from the mistakes of people like this guy.
- beering 12y ago
  These people still remember when you could graduate high school, go to work for GM for a few decades, and have the company pension to depend on in retirement. A suburban house with a white picket fence is somewhere in there too. Nowadays we're much more used to the at-will relationship. The employment only lasts until either the employee or the employer decides that things would be better off if the relationship ended. I don't think either is "weird" - just mindsets from different places/times. Actually, that kind of sounds like dating too.......
  - delluminatus 12y ago
    Yeah, that's true -- perhaps weird isn't the right word for it; more like foreign (to me). I find the idea of being so dependent on a corporation terrifying, so it's fascinating that some people have just thrown themselves into the arms of the the social contract without any qualms or backup plans. edit: OK, that sounds harsh. I have no idea what this dude had for qualms or backup plans; I'm just generalizing based on what I read about him. If you're out there, Todd, don't take my comments personally.
  - sp332 12y ago
    What am I supposed to do, live in fear every day of my life that my job might disappear tomorrow?
    - warfangle 12y ago
      No, but it might be a good idea to be prepared for that eventuality. Being prepared means also you won't have to be afraid ;)
    - cozuya 12y ago
      Should companies be forced to employ people indefinitely?
      - sp332 12y ago
        No, people can just starve on the streets, that's fine. Edit: this is a flippant response to a thoughtless question. The short answer is "no" and the long answer is: I'm really interested to hear what ideas you come up with when you think about it for more than 5 seconds.
    - delluminatus 12y ago
      I think it's important to cultivate a skillset that makes you valuable in the market, not just to rely on the security of your current position.
      - sp332 12y ago
        Yeah, it would probably bother me less if it were possible to find a job in a reasonable amount of time. Everyone I know who lost a job recently couldn't find work for months. Any reliable trade I can think of takes years to learn if you're apprenticed full-time, so how could I pick that up on the side? It doesn't help that, even though I went to a pretty nice college, the "career center" encourages resume-spamming as a good way to find a job. And they have completely ass-backwards advice for what to put on a resume - they're very buzzword-focused. I'd like to think I have marketable skills but I never learned how to market them effectively. I've been working on it but how do I know it will work until I really need a new job? And what if the economy gets worse before then? For that matter, how do I know what skills are in demand right now?
  - buzzcut 12y ago
    At 52, he had no such notion at all, I can virtually guarantee it. That employment model, predicated on strong unions in most cases, was well on its way to oblivion in the mid 80s, and by the time he was actively working, say in the late 80s/early 90s it was on life support. By that time there were vanishingly few people who though they were going to GM or US Steel for a lifetime job with a pension. This millennial vs. the 50-year-old thing is crazily ahistorical.
- mmagin 12y ago
  My impression is that most of the mandatory phase of education in the US teaches this lesson. It was well into my 20s that I really realized that I was taught wrong.
- sp332 12y ago
  Of course there's a social contract. We also have laws against burglary even if you leave your front door unlocked. There's a limit to how much people are allowed to screw you. If someone takes an action that results in you losing your house, that person is an asshole even if they're not technically a criminal.
- subdane 12y ago
  Because this view of reality was the American dream promised (literally and figuratively) by politicians, companies, churches, schools, families and advertisements in the 20th century.
- sosborn 12y ago
  >I don't think you would ever hear those words coming from a millennial. I have heard these words coming from a millennial. The thought process isn't related to age, it is related to the mindset that karma is real: if I do good things then good things will happen to me. People eat it up because nobody likes to see bad things happen to good people.
- DanBC 12y ago
  There is a huge amount of stigma around homelessness and poverty. "Those people are irresponsible and they deserve everything that happens". His story just reminds us that what happened to him can happen to most people.
  - bequanna 12y ago
    It does happen to some people. There is plenty of collateral damage when technology disrupts markets and jobs appear and disappear. But being possessing a stale skill set with no plan (or willingness) to retrain is simply irresponsible. If you've sent out 800 resumes for a type of position and haven't gotten so much as a callback, you are in denial.
  - delluminatus 12y ago
    Absolutely, it can happen to anyone, whether you're a "good citizen" or not. Without more details of his situation I can't say if I think he was being irresponsible or not, but irresponsibility (which is common) should not cause homelessness (which is bad).
- pessimizer 12y ago
  >I don't think you would ever hear those words coming from a millennial. Maybe we've just learned from the mistakes of people like this guy. Or maybe the world used to be different, and the millennials are being released into a world of unemployment and a largely dismantled safety net. The generation gap has narrowed for them, largely because they're still living with their parents after college.
- ankurpatel 12y ago
  To add to that in United States even if an employee is laid-off they are given severance package and on top of that they can apply for unemployement benefit and the government happily gives them a pay to survive on for about 6 months. Considering all of this I feel a salary man is in a good position and can find another job in 6 months.
  - zippergz 12y ago
    People can and do get laid off in the US with no severance.
  - ReadyCollective 12y ago
    First, from the article, he looked for a job for 18 months with solid experience but without success. Second, having been there, if you think going from a couple K a month while supporting a child instantly down to a couple hundred a week is simples, you haven't been there.
- jonnathanson 12y ago
  "I don't think you would ever hear those words coming from a millennial." Probably because Millennials grew up knowing there were wolves just outside the gates, and that your employer might throw you to them at any time. We're the first generation of Americans, in quite some time, to have experienced one significant crash or stagnation after the next. There is no "normal" in the job market, the stock market, the housing market, or just about any market for us. There never has been. We don't know normal, so accordingly, we're not clinging to it. I don't blame older generations for slipping hard when the rug gets pulled out from under them. They are products of a very different era. I wouldn't blame a polar bear for not knowing his way around a tropical rain forest. I wouldn't blame a jaguar for not knowing his way around an arctic tundra. By the same token, I don't entirely blame a person from the "good old days" for not knowing his way around the chaos that characterizes our economy today. And to whatever degree I do blame him, I don't blame him entirely. "I don't want to say it implies entitlement, exactly..." That's because it doesn't. Perhaps it's just my cushy, liberal upbringing saying this, but emotionally speaking, I have a very hard time calling Todd "entitled." He works his ass off, struggles to get by, and nearly kills himself trying to make life seem semi-normal for his young daughter. All of this on $30 a day. That's odd behavior for an entitled person. Maybe he lacked a degree of flexibility, or training, or resiliency in his career that led him to this point. That's a fair critique. He says he saved money, but we don't know how much, and we don't know what his spending habits were. Again, fair. We have plenty of things to analyze when picking apart Todd's story. But one thing he doesn't appear to be is entitled.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    This is an understandable but extremely ahistorical perspective. The reality is that the belief that wolves weren't outside the gates was a historical blip from the middle of the 20th century.
    - jonnathanson 12y ago
      Absolutely true. The middle of the 20th century was the aberration, not today. Nevertheless, I think the point still stands: people from the (aberrant) era of stability are unaccustomed to instability. Since memories only stretch back so far, and appear to be limited to generations, it's fair to say that Todd's generational (proximate) perspective was his "normal," and the "normal" for most people growing up over the last 50-odd years. This can still be true, even if that period was abnormal within the broader sweep of human history. Furthermore, I'd argue that today's instability is something quite different from the historical mean. We're not simply regressing to the natural state of economics. We're moving out of an aberrant era of atypically shared prosperity, but at the same time, we're being rocked by the result of a decades-long experiment in supply-side economics that has confounded and further destabilized our position. What we were in then was not normal. What we're in now is not entirely normal, either. But your broader point is very true: there have always been wolves outside the gates. That we paid no attention to them for 50-something years is unusual.
- rayiner 12y ago
  As a millennial, your attitude doesn't help you one bit. You're still unemployed, or slaving away at short term jobs with no upward mobility--you've just never known any better. Maybe his attitude smacks of "entitlement" (what a dirty word!) but at least he had the opportunity to work in an America where companies had to care at least a little about their employees (because outsourcing and automation had yet to destroy opportunities for ordinary people). So who exactly is the sucker?
- zippergz 12y ago
  You might not hear those words from a millenial, but I’ve heard many millenials complaining that their philosophy degree didn’t get them a well-paying job, or that it’s unfair for employers to expect them to already know how to do a job before hiring them. It feels like a similar mentality, just under different circumstances. (I don’t really buy into the whole “if only they’d worked harder/been smarter/prepared themselves better, they wouldn’t be in this situation” story line, but I also believe that thinking of yourself as a victim is counterproductive.)
- aphelion 12y ago
  You say this as if the 20-something libertarian software engineer isn't just as pissed off when he gets screwed over on equity or stock options as is the 50-something manufacturing worker whose job has just been outsourced.
TheAceOfHearts 12y ago
Why don't these people just move to more affordable places?
- remarkEon 12y ago
  Ok. Where?
  - bequanna 12y ago
    If you're looking for affordable housing, it would probably be wise to look anywhere other than SF: http://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-is-more-expensive-than-new-york-city-2014-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-is-more-expensi... The East Bay is only a 45 min BART ride away from downtown, and considerably cheaper.
    - selectodude 12y ago
      Only coming from personal experience, that $1737 number for a 1bed in Chicago is very high and makes me question the rest of their numbers.
      - remarkEon 12y ago
        Currently living in Seattle and their numbers seem pretty spot on anecdotally for what people are paying now, though a few of my friends are looking and they have found nothing under $2500 for a 2 bedroom. Seattle I think is going to be a city to watch closely the next few years for similar types of housing strife we see in SF. Once all the Amazon construction is complete it's going to get awfully crowded awfully fast.
- DanBC 12y ago
  How does a homeless person afford the travel to a "more affordable" place? (What does more affordable mean when they have no money?) Where do the nurses, teachers, security guards, waiters, shop assistants etc etc live?
kiba 12y ago
So, we got political deadlock in a way that constrains new housing addition. Why is the law not being changed?
- beering 12y ago
  Because they don't want it changed. Is it that hard to imagine that there's a subset of SF residents that don't want new housing built?
  - eqdw 12y ago
    It's trivially easy. Just think of all the debates we've had over gentrification in Nob Hill or Pac Heights. Oh wait. We haven't had any. Because these are the enclaves of people with so much wealth that even the techies can't afford to move in.
- potatolicious 12y ago
  Because the people with political clout are the ones that benefit from the housing shortage. You could be an owner, in which case the skyrocketing value of your property is something you'd like to defend. Or you could be a high-income renter, in which case you're willing and able to pay the sums necessary to live in a neighborhood of quaint, charming 3-story buildings, damn the consequences to people around you. This would be the "neighborhood character" argument. Both demographics have a lot more sway at City Hall than the working poor. What I find sad are the number of working poor who are fighting for neighborhood "preservation", since said preservation serves nothing except helping the rich live in a theme park of a 1930s emulation, a theme park that explicitly excludes themselves.
DanBlake 12y ago
There is a interesting anti-correlation between this and Prop G. Prop G will be a retroactive tax applied to anyone who bought a multi unit building in SF in the last few years who would sell it the next few years. Tenants have no problem pushing this bill stating that buying a building does not entitle you to a lifelong contract and that 'things can change' which will negatively effect you. So even though you bought a building a year ago with no hint it could be taxed at 25%, you are now expected to pay that tax if you sell. Now, on the other hand we have tenants who are upset that they have to leave their homes they (wrongly) assumed they could rent in forever. Either this is from ellis, OMI or other eviction. I feel for these people to a extent- But I am not a believer in the whole "right to stay in your birth city forever" movement. I do not believe anyone has any more of a right to live in San Francisco than they do Malibu or Aspen. It is one of the most expensive metros in the US. If you are a 90 year old grandmother who was counting on your landlord not evicting the whole building, you should have known that was a risky bet to begin with. If you want to stay in a place forever you should buy the home. Otherwise, you need to be prepared to move should situations change. You need to prepare for all 'disasters' - That could be eviction, fire, death, floods, etc.. If you dont prepare, I will be sorry for you- But I dont think that entitles legal protection either. If you lose your house from a fire with no insurance, you are going to bare that burden alone.
- ps4fanboy 12y ago
  As a non american looking at this from the outside this whole rental/tenant control looks like legislated communism.
  - maxerickson 12y ago
    As opposed to what other sort of communism? Also, note that "Prop G" is more or less the opposite of legislative, it's a ballot initiative, direct democracy.
    - dragonwriter 12y ago
      > Also, note that "Prop G" is more or less the opposite of legislative Legislative = law making. Prop G is more or less exactly legislative. > it's a ballot initiative, direct democracy. Yes, its a ballot initiative, which is a direct form of citizen exercise of legislative power (expressly, along with the power of referendum, reserved by the people in the otherwise-general assignment of legislative power to the State Legislature in Art. 4, Sec. 1 of the California State Constitution.)
api 12y ago
It's simple: Roaring economy, NIMBYism, affordable housing -- pick two. SF has picked roaring economy and NIMBYism.
Kalium 12y ago
To those people who believe this is the fault of tech - I have a question. What is the ethical way to move to San Francisco? Or anywhere in the Bay? What do you think is a good solution to this, beyond some variant on tech people owing undefined amounts of money to everyone else?
- k-mcgrady 12y ago
  I don't live in the US so my view is purely that of an outsider reading about this on HN over the last few years. My problem is this: a lot of tech companies, based outside San Francisco go out of their way to make it easy for employees to live in SF and get to work outside of it. This is bad for the people who have lived there for a long time as they can't compete with the money the tech industry brings to the market. If your job is in SF I think it's perfectly fine to live there no matter what industry it's in. But taking space and driving up the price of space that could be used by someone who NEEDS to live there (e.g. a local butcher/hairdresser/convenience store owner) when you don't is unethical in my opinion. Not to mention that if those people can't live in the city and close down or move their businesses your life there won't be as good. It's not illegal and like all ethical questions the answer will differ from person to person but that's what I think about it. Edit: Of course the problem is the mindset of a lot of tech people (evident in this thread). They think logically and love 'the free market'. They're also predominantly young. They don't understand living in a place for 30/40 years and being forced out. They seem to ignore the emotions involved or feel they are irrelevant.
  - eqdw 12y ago
    > My problem is this: a lot of tech companies, based outside San Francisco go out of their way to make it easy for employees to live in SF and get to work outside of it. This is not accurate, for two reasons. First off: Many of the peninsula cities (where these tech companies are located) make it even harder to build housing, especially for immigrants. Most of the housing in cities like PA and MV are single family homes that cost upwards of seven figures. You can't even afford that on your average tech salary; the only reason the people living there can afford it is because they moved in before the prices rose so much. The second, something I only learned recently, as of Sept 30th of this year, companies in the Bay Area with over 50 employees are legally required to either subsidize public transit for their employees, or provide their own (source: https://commuterbenefits.511.org/ https://commuterbenefits.511.org/). Painting Google busses as "going out of their way to make it easy for employees to live in SF" is (at least as of last month) not accurate
stephenitis 12y ago
Huge props for the beautiful layout and format. I'm excited that publishers/authors are taking more time into the design of articles they roll out.
stephenitis 12y ago
Huge props for the beautiful layout and format. I'm excited that publishers/authors are taking more time into the design of articles they roll out.
scythe 12y ago
People are concerned about "Manhattanization". That SF will become a "big city" and lose its "cultural charm", if zoning rules are relaxed and taller buildings are built outside the main valley that runs from FiDi to the Misdion. Well, you know what's worse than Manhattan? Miami Beach. That's where SF is headed, if this jingoism keeps up. You can't fight a mass of rich people who want to live in your town: you can only contain them. Build, baby, build.
dothething 12y ago
Move.
- tsotha 12y ago
  Yes. If housing is so damn expensive where you live, go somewhere else. It's really that simple.
jobu 12y ago
"...tech growth in cities like Seattle has been the same to San Francisco relative to its size, but the rise in the cost of living is less than a third of that experienced in San Francisco. This is largely attributed to the city building more housing to meet demand." This seems to be the root of the problem. So much of the blame gets put on tech companies or the rich getting richer, but no one blames the elected officials for not doing the right thing and allowing new housing to be built.
- x0x0 12y ago
  And yet this thread will be filled with tech employees shitting on those less fortunate than themselves. And what tech ceo is showing up at city council meetings up and down the peninsula demanding more housing, or in any fucking way using the platform their job gives them to help even their own employees, let alone other people in their communities? Ladies and gentlemen, DanBlake: If you are a 90 year old grandmother who was counting on your landlord not evicting the whole building, you should have known that was a risky bet to begin with. [1] Yup. Fuck grannie -- why didn't she anticipate rental prices doubling in 5 years? TheAceOfHearts: Why don't these people just move to more affordable places? [2] Piss on off out of your community, family, job, network, etc etc etc. DannyBee: Because people believe that once they've lived somewhere long enough, they have a right to live there forever. [3] Yup, it's a mystery why people living in sf don't like tech employees. It's literally stunning fyigm isn't more popular with the community! [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8495124 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8495124 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8494967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8494967 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8495015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8495015
  - Kalium 12y ago
    > And what tech ceo is showing up at city council meetings up and down the peninsula demanding more housing, or in any fucking way using the platform their job gives them to help even their own employees, let alone other people in their communities? http://money.cnn.com/2010/02/18/technology/google_zoning/ http://money.cnn.com/2010/02/18/technology/google_zoning/ Care to guess how that went? Tech CEOs are doing the jobs you proclaim them to not be. > Yup. Fuck grannie -- why didn't she anticipate rental prices doubling in 5 years? She didn't need to. She just needed to know that since she didn't own the property, she was at risk. That's the risk you take when you rent - you don't get the safety of owning. This has been true for centuries. Don't treat it like a novelty. > Piss on off out of your community, family, job, network, etc etc etc. I don't know about you, but I've done this. Multiple times. It hasn't killed me. It's not always fun, but that's life. Since you're here, I'll ask you - what do you think the correct and acceptable way for someone to move to and live in SF is?
ktothemc 12y ago
I was the person who wrote that super-long take on the San Francisco housing crisis in spring on TechCrunch. http://www.techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/ http://www.techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/ I'll just say this. It's four issues compounded. 1) Growth controls enacted in the 1960s and 1970s: Beginning in the late 1960s, the California Supreme Court started making a series of anti-development rulings: for example, one decision ruled that cities didn't have to compensate property owners for down-zoning their property, which reduces its value. This, of course, reduced financial risks for city governments that wanted to downzone massive tracts of land in their territory. At the same time, cities across the Bay began enacting growth controls. Petaluma was the first in 1972, with an ordinance that restricted the number of houses that could be built per year to 500. (Economic studies comparing Petaluma with adjacent cities showed that its property prices rose at a faster pace than cities w/out growth control.) Anti-growth measures began being widely adopted across the entire region. The behavior of California home prices started deviating from nationwide norms around 1975 or so. The problem became especially acute by the late 1970s, and so homeowners and tenants gave themselves a very sweet deal by effectively freezing their property taxes and rents via Prop. 13 and rent control. This insulated a majority of voters in cities like San Francisco from having to make tough decisions about in-fill development to match population growth. At this point, the mismatch is so out of whack and land is so valuable in San Francisco, that building a lot more housing probably wouldn't make it affordable to, say, a teacher salary level. Construction costs are $500,000 per unit, so your base price has to be at least that. 2) A byproduct of tech-dependent economic development strategy happens to be a lot of income inequality. I haven't seen a good solution to this. After manufacturing jobs dissipated from the U.S., a handful of cities like New York, Boston and San Francisco were successful at reviving themselves through a route of attracting highly-skilled, high-income workers. A consequence of this is a barbell-like jobs market where you have highly compensated workers in finance and tech on one side, and a whole cohort of service workers on the other. I've seen this wherever I travel. I went to Tel Aviv, which is arguably more dependent on tech than San Francisco with 10-11 percent of the workforce in the industry versus 6.7 percent here. Same issues with income inequality, inclusiveness and diversity. 3) Globalization of capital flows. Real estate used to be more of a local business, but now a lot of local firms have been swallowed up by REITS, which don't have any connection to the local community. At the same time, the Chinese property market is collapsing, sending flows of homebuyers and their cash over here. These are people who may not intend to actually live in the Bay Area, yet they buy up homes without even seeing them. The city doesn't know how to police this. How would you build a law or tax around regulating this behavior? New York may attempt a pied-a-terre tax, but no one really knows how to deal with this issue of vacant housing units held as investments. Technologically, it's easy to track who is doing what where at all times. But legally, there are a lot of issues around privacy with policing this if foreign buyers are taking up 1/3 of the new housing stock as investments. Similarly in the venture world, while overall VC funds being raised is lower than what it was during the first dot-com bubble, according to the NVCA, there's a lot of PE and foreign investment that I don't think is calculated into the overall numbers. 4) Last is the lack of regional coordination. New York is 8.4 million people under one government. London is also 8.4 million people under one government. The Bay Area is 7 million people under 101 city governments and 10 bus and rail systems. There have been numerous attempts to consolidate power over the last century, but all have failed. The California state Constitution also deeply empowers its city governments compared to other states. So what happens is the rich cities don't build any housing, because they like their property values and don't like traffic congestion, or to crowd their schools. This drives prices up in the suburbs to a point where, on balance, urban environments look more attractive -- not just because of changing tastes, but also because they're not that much more expensive than the South Bay. So young people end up crowding into these poorer disinvested neighborhoods like the Mission or Oakland, which then displaces minorities and the elderly far out into the exurbs or even Central California.
krigi 12y ago
The housing problem is real. The suppliers/property owners know there is a lack of supply, so now they're just getting greedy. Three hours ago this unit was $1600. It was updated to $1800. http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/apa/4726648527.html http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/apa/4726648527.html It doesn't even have a kitchen. It's just a room with a toilet - at nearly $10 per sq. ft.
- ulfw 12y ago
  That is just beyond ridiculous. A small room you can't even sleep in (mentions excessive noise SEVERAL times) for almost $40,000/yr pre-tax all-in. Why people move there is beyond me...
scobar 12y ago
"For many San Franciscans who have been displaced or are on the verge of losing their homes, there's pain and a sense of powerlessness." When I recently visited the Bay Area for the first time, I spoke with a worker who was helping with the catering of one of the events I attended. I sat with him while he was on break, and getting a bite to eat. When I asked him about himself, the conversation quickly arrived at this topic of gentrification. This sense of powerlessness is exactly how he felt, but there was also resentment toward new inhabitants making enough to afford the high cost of living. Tech companies and workers are not the only (nor the main) cause of this issue, yet they're likely receiving a higher fraction of the blame. Whether this resentment is justified or not, it doesn't seem to be getting better with time. The cold but logical advice to "just move somewhere more affordable." isn't an acceptable solution to many of those who were or will be displaced. I don't want to move to the Bay Area and exacerbate the problem, but there are clearly some great benefits of basing a startup there. So it's a difficult choice. Hopefully VR or another technology will make remote work a better solution than relocation in the future. Also, a better way to quickly and affordably retrain and enter a new profession must be made available to displaced workers so automation can replace low-wage service industry jobs faster.
smsm42 12y ago
Something that jumped at me in the beginning, about the soup kitchen line: Some carry iPods and smartphones, others come in suits. Am I wrong to assume that somebody that can afford a smartphone and accompanying plans (which are not that cheap) and other gadgets like iPod, which probably means they own a computer and a broadband internet connection too - usually aren't so poor that they would literally starve without a soup kitchen?
- pchristensen 12y ago
  Some smartphones are under $200 with pay as you go plans. Also, it's getting harder to get a feature phone now. People keep them for years, for what could be < $0.30/day. Also, if it lets you search for jobs, schedule interviews, etc, it can be essential for getting your next job/interview (ditto the suit). People make judgement calls about what they need, and a smartphone is probably just as essential to someone seeking employment in the city as a working car is for someone looking for a job in the suburbs. Even if you need to take it to the soup kitchen.
  - smsm42 12y ago
    I'm not sure how the smartphone is essential, could you explain? If you need to look up jobs, local library and good old pen & paper is always at your service. Same with recording and keeping appointments - a good old notebook would work. Calling prospective employers doesn't need a smartphone. If you need to make something like printed resume, smartphone is no help, you need a real computer anyway. So where it is essential? I'm not sure I still get it.
- chipotle_coyote 12y ago
  This is a common thought, but it can be awfully misleading. First, anything that doesn't have a recurring charge -- like the suit and the iPod -- is something that may well have been bought when they had a higher income level. Second, if you're looking for work today -- even outside of the tech sector -- not having a phone is very often not an option. Prospective employers need to be able to reach you and vice-versa, and if you're a temp worker or day laborer you need to be able to get that phone message very fast. If you're homeless a mobile phone may be your only realistic option. Why not a cheaper phone than a smartphone? Even if you're poor, you may still want email and text messages and web browsing; email is close to a necessity in America today, web browsing is immensely useful, and that smartphone may also be your only source of entertainment. I think HN-ers may also tend to think of "smartphone" as implying "$200+ device and $100/mo bill," but it's pretty easy to get a $50 Android or Lumia phone and a $50-60/mo plan these days. Last but not least, IIRC the article suggested the "suits and smartphones" types were people who weren't homeless yet, but whose rents had increased to a point where they were having trouble affording food. Someone making $20 an hour, way over minimum wage, would gross about $40K a year and net about $2500 a month -- they'd be lucky if "only" 75% of that was going to rent (assuming they'd started renting a few years ago when that was remotely possible). But they'd be making way too much to qualify for any government assistance like food stamps (SNAP).
adwf 12y ago
Sounds like a great startup idea: End the San Francisco construction ban. Make a lot of money. Everyone always says to look for pain points when creating your startup, this is a great example. Maybe it's overlooked because it's not internet/software related ;)
_linden_ 12y ago
If you are serious about the problems that result from NIMBY anti-growth sentiments, I strongly recommend that you join one of the following groups working to influence their city councils to build more housing. Just liking them on FB goes a long way to giving them more influence and credibility with their city councils and when you reshare their blogs or FB posts, if they gain just one more person willing to come to city hall with them, it's a terrific win. People ARE trying to do something about this problem, including many from the tech sector. Take the feelings you have from this article and channel into a concrete good that you can do right now, today, for minimal effort and zero cost. The sad truth is that the people whose voices get heard at city council today are generally those people wealthy enough in both dollars and time to spend hours every week at city hall. They're mostly retired homeowners sitting on multimillion dollar properties. Renters, poor people, and homeless people receive almost no representation because they don't have the luxury of coming to city hall meetings- they're busy figuring out where they're going to spend the night and how they're going to feed their kids this week. These groups are doing just that on their behalf, so please support them. If you're in Palo Alto, check out www.paloaltoforward.com (also www.facebook.com/paloaltoforward If you're in Mountain View, check out http://balancedmv.org/ http://balancedmv.org/ and https://www.facebook.com/mvhousingdiversity https://www.facebook.com/mvhousingdiversity If you're in SF, https://www.facebook.com/BARentersFed https://www.facebook.com/BARentersFed and www.sfbarf.org Menlo Park: https://www.facebook.com/MenloParkNoOnM https://www.facebook.com/MenloParkNoOnM

90 points by dthal 12y ago

Loading extremely slowly for me. Google cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6m1opfxYLn0J:www.vox.com/a/homeless-san-francisco-tech-boom https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6m1opf... After reading the article, this quote really jumped out at me: "I was going along, being a good citizen," Todd, now 52 years old, says. "I was a volunteer firefighter, I coached football and baseball, I was saving my money, doing everything you're supposed to do, being a single father, raising my daughter by myself. Then the economy just went to hell and the company threw me to the wolves." This is interesting because it sounds like what I've come to think of as the "salaryman" mentality: the idea that there is a contract between employee and company help each other, forever. I don't want to say it implies entitlement, exactly, but more like a weird view of reality. Why do people think being a "good citizen" who "does everything you're supposed to do" means nothing will ever screw them? Or is this just rhetoric that people use to make themselves sound victimized? I think this is a generational gap (in America, anyway). I don't think you would ever hear those words coming from a millennial. Maybe we've just learned from the mistakes of people like this guy.

beering 12y ago
These people still remember when you could graduate high school, go to work for GM for a few decades, and have the company pension to depend on in retirement. A suburban house with a white picket fence is somewhere in there too. Nowadays we're much more used to the at-will relationship. The employment only lasts until either the employee or the employer decides that things would be better off if the relationship ended. I don't think either is "weird" - just mindsets from different places/times. Actually, that kind of sounds like dating too.......
- delluminatus 12y ago
  Yeah, that's true -- perhaps weird isn't the right word for it; more like foreign (to me). I find the idea of being so dependent on a corporation terrifying, so it's fascinating that some people have just thrown themselves into the arms of the the social contract without any qualms or backup plans. edit: OK, that sounds harsh. I have no idea what this dude had for qualms or backup plans; I'm just generalizing based on what I read about him. If you're out there, Todd, don't take my comments personally.
- sp332 12y ago
  What am I supposed to do, live in fear every day of my life that my job might disappear tomorrow?
  - warfangle 12y ago
    No, but it might be a good idea to be prepared for that eventuality. Being prepared means also you won't have to be afraid ;)
  - cozuya 12y ago
    Should companies be forced to employ people indefinitely?
    - sp332 12y ago
      No, people can just starve on the streets, that's fine. Edit: this is a flippant response to a thoughtless question. The short answer is "no" and the long answer is: I'm really interested to hear what ideas you come up with when you think about it for more than 5 seconds.
  - delluminatus 12y ago
    I think it's important to cultivate a skillset that makes you valuable in the market, not just to rely on the security of your current position.
    - sp332 12y ago
      Yeah, it would probably bother me less if it were possible to find a job in a reasonable amount of time. Everyone I know who lost a job recently couldn't find work for months. Any reliable trade I can think of takes years to learn if you're apprenticed full-time, so how could I pick that up on the side? It doesn't help that, even though I went to a pretty nice college, the "career center" encourages resume-spamming as a good way to find a job. And they have completely ass-backwards advice for what to put on a resume - they're very buzzword-focused. I'd like to think I have marketable skills but I never learned how to market them effectively. I've been working on it but how do I know it will work until I really need a new job? And what if the economy gets worse before then? For that matter, how do I know what skills are in demand right now?
- buzzcut 12y ago
  At 52, he had no such notion at all, I can virtually guarantee it. That employment model, predicated on strong unions in most cases, was well on its way to oblivion in the mid 80s, and by the time he was actively working, say in the late 80s/early 90s it was on life support. By that time there were vanishingly few people who though they were going to GM or US Steel for a lifetime job with a pension. This millennial vs. the 50-year-old thing is crazily ahistorical.
mmagin 12y ago
My impression is that most of the mandatory phase of education in the US teaches this lesson. It was well into my 20s that I really realized that I was taught wrong.
sp332 12y ago
Of course there's a social contract. We also have laws against burglary even if you leave your front door unlocked. There's a limit to how much people are allowed to screw you. If someone takes an action that results in you losing your house, that person is an asshole even if they're not technically a criminal.
subdane 12y ago
Because this view of reality was the American dream promised (literally and figuratively) by politicians, companies, churches, schools, families and advertisements in the 20th century.
sosborn 12y ago
>I don't think you would ever hear those words coming from a millennial. I have heard these words coming from a millennial. The thought process isn't related to age, it is related to the mindset that karma is real: if I do good things then good things will happen to me. People eat it up because nobody likes to see bad things happen to good people.
DanBC 12y ago
There is a huge amount of stigma around homelessness and poverty. "Those people are irresponsible and they deserve everything that happens". His story just reminds us that what happened to him can happen to most people.
- bequanna 12y ago
  It does happen to some people. There is plenty of collateral damage when technology disrupts markets and jobs appear and disappear. But being possessing a stale skill set with no plan (or willingness) to retrain is simply irresponsible. If you've sent out 800 resumes for a type of position and haven't gotten so much as a callback, you are in denial.
- delluminatus 12y ago
  Absolutely, it can happen to anyone, whether you're a "good citizen" or not. Without more details of his situation I can't say if I think he was being irresponsible or not, but irresponsibility (which is common) should not cause homelessness (which is bad).
pessimizer 12y ago
>I don't think you would ever hear those words coming from a millennial. Maybe we've just learned from the mistakes of people like this guy. Or maybe the world used to be different, and the millennials are being released into a world of unemployment and a largely dismantled safety net. The generation gap has narrowed for them, largely because they're still living with their parents after college.
ankurpatel 12y ago
To add to that in United States even if an employee is laid-off they are given severance package and on top of that they can apply for unemployement benefit and the government happily gives them a pay to survive on for about 6 months. Considering all of this I feel a salary man is in a good position and can find another job in 6 months.
- zippergz 12y ago
  People can and do get laid off in the US with no severance.
- ReadyCollective 12y ago
  First, from the article, he looked for a job for 18 months with solid experience but without success. Second, having been there, if you think going from a couple K a month while supporting a child instantly down to a couple hundred a week is simples, you haven't been there.
jonnathanson 12y ago
"I don't think you would ever hear those words coming from a millennial." Probably because Millennials grew up knowing there were wolves just outside the gates, and that your employer might throw you to them at any time. We're the first generation of Americans, in quite some time, to have experienced one significant crash or stagnation after the next. There is no "normal" in the job market, the stock market, the housing market, or just about any market for us. There never has been. We don't know normal, so accordingly, we're not clinging to it. I don't blame older generations for slipping hard when the rug gets pulled out from under them. They are products of a very different era. I wouldn't blame a polar bear for not knowing his way around a tropical rain forest. I wouldn't blame a jaguar for not knowing his way around an arctic tundra. By the same token, I don't entirely blame a person from the "good old days" for not knowing his way around the chaos that characterizes our economy today. And to whatever degree I do blame him, I don't blame him entirely. "I don't want to say it implies entitlement, exactly..." That's because it doesn't. Perhaps it's just my cushy, liberal upbringing saying this, but emotionally speaking, I have a very hard time calling Todd "entitled." He works his ass off, struggles to get by, and nearly kills himself trying to make life seem semi-normal for his young daughter. All of this on $30 a day. That's odd behavior for an entitled person. Maybe he lacked a degree of flexibility, or training, or resiliency in his career that led him to this point. That's a fair critique. He says he saved money, but we don't know how much, and we don't know what his spending habits were. Again, fair. We have plenty of things to analyze when picking apart Todd's story. But one thing he doesn't appear to be is entitled.
- tptacek 12y ago
  This is an understandable but extremely ahistorical perspective. The reality is that the belief that wolves weren't outside the gates was a historical blip from the middle of the 20th century.
  - jonnathanson 12y ago
    Absolutely true. The middle of the 20th century was the aberration, not today. Nevertheless, I think the point still stands: people from the (aberrant) era of stability are unaccustomed to instability. Since memories only stretch back so far, and appear to be limited to generations, it's fair to say that Todd's generational (proximate) perspective was his "normal," and the "normal" for most people growing up over the last 50-odd years. This can still be true, even if that period was abnormal within the broader sweep of human history. Furthermore, I'd argue that today's instability is something quite different from the historical mean. We're not simply regressing to the natural state of economics. We're moving out of an aberrant era of atypically shared prosperity, but at the same time, we're being rocked by the result of a decades-long experiment in supply-side economics that has confounded and further destabilized our position. What we were in then was not normal. What we're in now is not entirely normal, either. But your broader point is very true: there have always been wolves outside the gates. That we paid no attention to them for 50-something years is unusual.
rayiner 12y ago
As a millennial, your attitude doesn't help you one bit. You're still unemployed, or slaving away at short term jobs with no upward mobility--you've just never known any better. Maybe his attitude smacks of "entitlement" (what a dirty word!) but at least he had the opportunity to work in an America where companies had to care at least a little about their employees (because outsourcing and automation had yet to destroy opportunities for ordinary people). So who exactly is the sucker?
zippergz 12y ago
You might not hear those words from a millenial, but I’ve heard many millenials complaining that their philosophy degree didn’t get them a well-paying job, or that it’s unfair for employers to expect them to already know how to do a job before hiring them. It feels like a similar mentality, just under different circumstances. (I don’t really buy into the whole “if only they’d worked harder/been smarter/prepared themselves better, they wouldn’t be in this situation” story line, but I also believe that thinking of yourself as a victim is counterproductive.)
aphelion 12y ago
You say this as if the 20-something libertarian software engineer isn't just as pissed off when he gets screwed over on equity or stock options as is the 50-something manufacturing worker whose job has just been outsourced.

TheAceOfHearts 12y ago

Why don't these people just move to more affordable places?

remarkEon 12y ago
Ok. Where?
- bequanna 12y ago
  If you're looking for affordable housing, it would probably be wise to look anywhere other than SF: http://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-is-more-expensive-than-new-york-city-2014-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-is-more-expensi... The East Bay is only a 45 min BART ride away from downtown, and considerably cheaper.
  - selectodude 12y ago
    Only coming from personal experience, that $1737 number for a 1bed in Chicago is very high and makes me question the rest of their numbers.
    - remarkEon 12y ago
      Currently living in Seattle and their numbers seem pretty spot on anecdotally for what people are paying now, though a few of my friends are looking and they have found nothing under $2500 for a 2 bedroom. Seattle I think is going to be a city to watch closely the next few years for similar types of housing strife we see in SF. Once all the Amazon construction is complete it's going to get awfully crowded awfully fast.
DanBC 12y ago
How does a homeless person afford the travel to a "more affordable" place? (What does more affordable mean when they have no money?) Where do the nurses, teachers, security guards, waiters, shop assistants etc etc live?

kiba 12y ago

So, we got political deadlock in a way that constrains new housing addition. Why is the law not being changed?

beering 12y ago
Because they don't want it changed. Is it that hard to imagine that there's a subset of SF residents that don't want new housing built?
- eqdw 12y ago
  It's trivially easy. Just think of all the debates we've had over gentrification in Nob Hill or Pac Heights. Oh wait. We haven't had any. Because these are the enclaves of people with so much wealth that even the techies can't afford to move in.
potatolicious 12y ago
Because the people with political clout are the ones that benefit from the housing shortage. You could be an owner, in which case the skyrocketing value of your property is something you'd like to defend. Or you could be a high-income renter, in which case you're willing and able to pay the sums necessary to live in a neighborhood of quaint, charming 3-story buildings, damn the consequences to people around you. This would be the "neighborhood character" argument. Both demographics have a lot more sway at City Hall than the working poor. What I find sad are the number of working poor who are fighting for neighborhood "preservation", since said preservation serves nothing except helping the rich live in a theme park of a 1930s emulation, a theme park that explicitly excludes themselves.

DanBlake 12y ago

There is a interesting anti-correlation between this and Prop G. Prop G will be a retroactive tax applied to anyone who bought a multi unit building in SF in the last few years who would sell it the next few years. Tenants have no problem pushing this bill stating that buying a building does not entitle you to a lifelong contract and that 'things can change' which will negatively effect you. So even though you bought a building a year ago with no hint it could be taxed at 25%, you are now expected to pay that tax if you sell. Now, on the other hand we have tenants who are upset that they have to leave their homes they (wrongly) assumed they could rent in forever. Either this is from ellis, OMI or other eviction. I feel for these people to a extent- But I am not a believer in the whole "right to stay in your birth city forever" movement. I do not believe anyone has any more of a right to live in San Francisco than they do Malibu or Aspen. It is one of the most expensive metros in the US. If you are a 90 year old grandmother who was counting on your landlord not evicting the whole building, you should have known that was a risky bet to begin with. If you want to stay in a place forever you should buy the home. Otherwise, you need to be prepared to move should situations change. You need to prepare for all 'disasters' - That could be eviction, fire, death, floods, etc.. If you dont prepare, I will be sorry for you- But I dont think that entitles legal protection either. If you lose your house from a fire with no insurance, you are going to bare that burden alone.

ps4fanboy 12y ago
As a non american looking at this from the outside this whole rental/tenant control looks like legislated communism.
- maxerickson 12y ago
  As opposed to what other sort of communism? Also, note that "Prop G" is more or less the opposite of legislative, it's a ballot initiative, direct democracy.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > Also, note that "Prop G" is more or less the opposite of legislative Legislative = law making. Prop G is more or less exactly legislative. > it's a ballot initiative, direct democracy. Yes, its a ballot initiative, which is a direct form of citizen exercise of legislative power (expressly, along with the power of referendum, reserved by the people in the otherwise-general assignment of legislative power to the State Legislature in Art. 4, Sec. 1 of the California State Constitution.)

api 12y ago

It's simple: Roaring economy, NIMBYism, affordable housing -- pick two. SF has picked roaring economy and NIMBYism.

Kalium 12y ago

To those people who believe this is the fault of tech - I have a question. What is the ethical way to move to San Francisco? Or anywhere in the Bay? What do you think is a good solution to this, beyond some variant on tech people owing undefined amounts of money to everyone else?

k-mcgrady 12y ago
I don't live in the US so my view is purely that of an outsider reading about this on HN over the last few years. My problem is this: a lot of tech companies, based outside San Francisco go out of their way to make it easy for employees to live in SF and get to work outside of it. This is bad for the people who have lived there for a long time as they can't compete with the money the tech industry brings to the market. If your job is in SF I think it's perfectly fine to live there no matter what industry it's in. But taking space and driving up the price of space that could be used by someone who NEEDS to live there (e.g. a local butcher/hairdresser/convenience store owner) when you don't is unethical in my opinion. Not to mention that if those people can't live in the city and close down or move their businesses your life there won't be as good. It's not illegal and like all ethical questions the answer will differ from person to person but that's what I think about it. Edit: Of course the problem is the mindset of a lot of tech people (evident in this thread). They think logically and love 'the free market'. They're also predominantly young. They don't understand living in a place for 30/40 years and being forced out. They seem to ignore the emotions involved or feel they are irrelevant.
- eqdw 12y ago
  > My problem is this: a lot of tech companies, based outside San Francisco go out of their way to make it easy for employees to live in SF and get to work outside of it. This is not accurate, for two reasons. First off: Many of the peninsula cities (where these tech companies are located) make it even harder to build housing, especially for immigrants. Most of the housing in cities like PA and MV are single family homes that cost upwards of seven figures. You can't even afford that on your average tech salary; the only reason the people living there can afford it is because they moved in before the prices rose so much. The second, something I only learned recently, as of Sept 30th of this year, companies in the Bay Area with over 50 employees are legally required to either subsidize public transit for their employees, or provide their own (source: https://commuterbenefits.511.org/ https://commuterbenefits.511.org/). Painting Google busses as "going out of their way to make it easy for employees to live in SF" is (at least as of last month) not accurate

stephenitis 12y ago

Huge props for the beautiful layout and format. I'm excited that publishers/authors are taking more time into the design of articles they roll out.

stephenitis 12y ago

Huge props for the beautiful layout and format. I'm excited that publishers/authors are taking more time into the design of articles they roll out.

scythe 12y ago

People are concerned about "Manhattanization". That SF will become a "big city" and lose its "cultural charm", if zoning rules are relaxed and taller buildings are built outside the main valley that runs from FiDi to the Misdion. Well, you know what's worse than Manhattan? Miami Beach. That's where SF is headed, if this jingoism keeps up. You can't fight a mass of rich people who want to live in your town: you can only contain them. Build, baby, build.

dothething 12y ago

Move.

tsotha 12y ago
Yes. If housing is so damn expensive where you live, go somewhere else. It's really that simple.

jobu 12y ago

"...tech growth in cities like Seattle has been the same to San Francisco relative to its size, but the rise in the cost of living is less than a third of that experienced in San Francisco. This is largely attributed to the city building more housing to meet demand." This seems to be the root of the problem. So much of the blame gets put on tech companies or the rich getting richer, but no one blames the elected officials for not doing the right thing and allowing new housing to be built.

x0x0 12y ago
And yet this thread will be filled with tech employees shitting on those less fortunate than themselves. And what tech ceo is showing up at city council meetings up and down the peninsula demanding more housing, or in any fucking way using the platform their job gives them to help even their own employees, let alone other people in their communities? Ladies and gentlemen, DanBlake: If you are a 90 year old grandmother who was counting on your landlord not evicting the whole building, you should have known that was a risky bet to begin with. [1] Yup. Fuck grannie -- why didn't she anticipate rental prices doubling in 5 years? TheAceOfHearts: Why don't these people just move to more affordable places? [2] Piss on off out of your community, family, job, network, etc etc etc. DannyBee: Because people believe that once they've lived somewhere long enough, they have a right to live there forever. [3] Yup, it's a mystery why people living in sf don't like tech employees. It's literally stunning fyigm isn't more popular with the community! [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8495124 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8495124 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8494967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8494967 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8495015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8495015
- Kalium 12y ago
  > And what tech ceo is showing up at city council meetings up and down the peninsula demanding more housing, or in any fucking way using the platform their job gives them to help even their own employees, let alone other people in their communities? http://money.cnn.com/2010/02/18/technology/google_zoning/ http://money.cnn.com/2010/02/18/technology/google_zoning/ Care to guess how that went? Tech CEOs are doing the jobs you proclaim them to not be. > Yup. Fuck grannie -- why didn't she anticipate rental prices doubling in 5 years? She didn't need to. She just needed to know that since she didn't own the property, she was at risk. That's the risk you take when you rent - you don't get the safety of owning. This has been true for centuries. Don't treat it like a novelty. > Piss on off out of your community, family, job, network, etc etc etc. I don't know about you, but I've done this. Multiple times. It hasn't killed me. It's not always fun, but that's life. Since you're here, I'll ask you - what do you think the correct and acceptable way for someone to move to and live in SF is?

ktothemc 12y ago

I was the person who wrote that super-long take on the San Francisco housing crisis in spring on TechCrunch. http://www.techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/ http://www.techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/ I'll just say this. It's four issues compounded. 1) Growth controls enacted in the 1960s and 1970s: Beginning in the late 1960s, the California Supreme Court started making a series of anti-development rulings: for example, one decision ruled that cities didn't have to compensate property owners for down-zoning their property, which reduces its value. This, of course, reduced financial risks for city governments that wanted to downzone massive tracts of land in their territory. At the same time, cities across the Bay began enacting growth controls. Petaluma was the first in 1972, with an ordinance that restricted the number of houses that could be built per year to 500. (Economic studies comparing Petaluma with adjacent cities showed that its property prices rose at a faster pace than cities w/out growth control.) Anti-growth measures began being widely adopted across the entire region. The behavior of California home prices started deviating from nationwide norms around 1975 or so. The problem became especially acute by the late 1970s, and so homeowners and tenants gave themselves a very sweet deal by effectively freezing their property taxes and rents via Prop. 13 and rent control. This insulated a majority of voters in cities like San Francisco from having to make tough decisions about in-fill development to match population growth. At this point, the mismatch is so out of whack and land is so valuable in San Francisco, that building a lot more housing probably wouldn't make it affordable to, say, a teacher salary level. Construction costs are $500,000 per unit, so your base price has to be at least that. 2) A byproduct of tech-dependent economic development strategy happens to be a lot of income inequality. I haven't seen a good solution to this. After manufacturing jobs dissipated from the U.S., a handful of cities like New York, Boston and San Francisco were successful at reviving themselves through a route of attracting highly-skilled, high-income workers. A consequence of this is a barbell-like jobs market where you have highly compensated workers in finance and tech on one side, and a whole cohort of service workers on the other. I've seen this wherever I travel. I went to Tel Aviv, which is arguably more dependent on tech than San Francisco with 10-11 percent of the workforce in the industry versus 6.7 percent here. Same issues with income inequality, inclusiveness and diversity. 3) Globalization of capital flows. Real estate used to be more of a local business, but now a lot of local firms have been swallowed up by REITS, which don't have any connection to the local community. At the same time, the Chinese property market is collapsing, sending flows of homebuyers and their cash over here. These are people who may not intend to actually live in the Bay Area, yet they buy up homes without even seeing them. The city doesn't know how to police this. How would you build a law or tax around regulating this behavior? New York may attempt a pied-a-terre tax, but no one really knows how to deal with this issue of vacant housing units held as investments. Technologically, it's easy to track who is doing what where at all times. But legally, there are a lot of issues around privacy with policing this if foreign buyers are taking up 1/3 of the new housing stock as investments. Similarly in the venture world, while overall VC funds being raised is lower than what it was during the first dot-com bubble, according to the NVCA, there's a lot of PE and foreign investment that I don't think is calculated into the overall numbers. 4) Last is the lack of regional coordination. New York is 8.4 million people under one government. London is also 8.4 million people under one government. The Bay Area is 7 million people under 101 city governments and 10 bus and rail systems. There have been numerous attempts to consolidate power over the last century, but all have failed. The California state Constitution also deeply empowers its city governments compared to other states. So what happens is the rich cities don't build any housing, because they like their property values and don't like traffic congestion, or to crowd their schools. This drives prices up in the suburbs to a point where, on balance, urban environments look more attractive -- not just because of changing tastes, but also because they're not that much more expensive than the South Bay. So young people end up crowding into these poorer disinvested neighborhoods like the Mission or Oakland, which then displaces minorities and the elderly far out into the exurbs or even Central California.

krigi 12y ago

The housing problem is real. The suppliers/property owners know there is a lack of supply, so now they're just getting greedy. Three hours ago this unit was $1600. It was updated to $1800. http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/apa/4726648527.html http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/apa/4726648527.html It doesn't even have a kitchen. It's just a room with a toilet - at nearly $10 per sq. ft.

ulfw 12y ago
That is just beyond ridiculous. A small room you can't even sleep in (mentions excessive noise SEVERAL times) for almost $40,000/yr pre-tax all-in. Why people move there is beyond me...

scobar 12y ago

"For many San Franciscans who have been displaced or are on the verge of losing their homes, there's pain and a sense of powerlessness." When I recently visited the Bay Area for the first time, I spoke with a worker who was helping with the catering of one of the events I attended. I sat with him while he was on break, and getting a bite to eat. When I asked him about himself, the conversation quickly arrived at this topic of gentrification. This sense of powerlessness is exactly how he felt, but there was also resentment toward new inhabitants making enough to afford the high cost of living. Tech companies and workers are not the only (nor the main) cause of this issue, yet they're likely receiving a higher fraction of the blame. Whether this resentment is justified or not, it doesn't seem to be getting better with time. The cold but logical advice to "just move somewhere more affordable." isn't an acceptable solution to many of those who were or will be displaced. I don't want to move to the Bay Area and exacerbate the problem, but there are clearly some great benefits of basing a startup there. So it's a difficult choice. Hopefully VR or another technology will make remote work a better solution than relocation in the future. Also, a better way to quickly and affordably retrain and enter a new profession must be made available to displaced workers so automation can replace low-wage service industry jobs faster.

smsm42 12y ago

Something that jumped at me in the beginning, about the soup kitchen line: Some carry iPods and smartphones, others come in suits. Am I wrong to assume that somebody that can afford a smartphone and accompanying plans (which are not that cheap) and other gadgets like iPod, which probably means they own a computer and a broadband internet connection too - usually aren't so poor that they would literally starve without a soup kitchen?

pchristensen 12y ago
Some smartphones are under $200 with pay as you go plans. Also, it's getting harder to get a feature phone now. People keep them for years, for what could be < $0.30/day. Also, if it lets you search for jobs, schedule interviews, etc, it can be essential for getting your next job/interview (ditto the suit). People make judgement calls about what they need, and a smartphone is probably just as essential to someone seeking employment in the city as a working car is for someone looking for a job in the suburbs. Even if you need to take it to the soup kitchen.
- smsm42 12y ago
  I'm not sure how the smartphone is essential, could you explain? If you need to look up jobs, local library and good old pen & paper is always at your service. Same with recording and keeping appointments - a good old notebook would work. Calling prospective employers doesn't need a smartphone. If you need to make something like printed resume, smartphone is no help, you need a real computer anyway. So where it is essential? I'm not sure I still get it.
chipotle_coyote 12y ago
This is a common thought, but it can be awfully misleading. First, anything that doesn't have a recurring charge -- like the suit and the iPod -- is something that may well have been bought when they had a higher income level. Second, if you're looking for work today -- even outside of the tech sector -- not having a phone is very often not an option. Prospective employers need to be able to reach you and vice-versa, and if you're a temp worker or day laborer you need to be able to get that phone message very fast. If you're homeless a mobile phone may be your only realistic option. Why not a cheaper phone than a smartphone? Even if you're poor, you may still want email and text messages and web browsing; email is close to a necessity in America today, web browsing is immensely useful, and that smartphone may also be your only source of entertainment. I think HN-ers may also tend to think of "smartphone" as implying "$200+ device and $100/mo bill," but it's pretty easy to get a $50 Android or Lumia phone and a $50-60/mo plan these days. Last but not least, IIRC the article suggested the "suits and smartphones" types were people who weren't homeless yet, but whose rents had increased to a point where they were having trouble affording food. Someone making $20 an hour, way over minimum wage, would gross about $40K a year and net about $2500 a month -- they'd be lucky if "only" 75% of that was going to rent (assuming they'd started renting a few years ago when that was remotely possible). But they'd be making way too much to qualify for any government assistance like food stamps (SNAP).

adwf 12y ago

Sounds like a great startup idea: End the San Francisco construction ban. Make a lot of money. Everyone always says to look for pain points when creating your startup, this is a great example. Maybe it's overlooked because it's not internet/software related ;)

_linden_ 12y ago

If you are serious about the problems that result from NIMBY anti-growth sentiments, I strongly recommend that you join one of the following groups working to influence their city councils to build more housing. Just liking them on FB goes a long way to giving them more influence and credibility with their city councils and when you reshare their blogs or FB posts, if they gain just one more person willing to come to city hall with them, it's a terrific win. People ARE trying to do something about this problem, including many from the tech sector. Take the feelings you have from this article and channel into a concrete good that you can do right now, today, for minimal effort and zero cost. The sad truth is that the people whose voices get heard at city council today are generally those people wealthy enough in both dollars and time to spend hours every week at city hall. They're mostly retired homeowners sitting on multimillion dollar properties. Renters, poor people, and homeless people receive almost no representation because they don't have the luxury of coming to city hall meetings- they're busy figuring out where they're going to spend the night and how they're going to feed their kids this week. These groups are doing just that on their behalf, so please support them. If you're in Palo Alto, check out www.paloaltoforward.com (also www.facebook.com/paloaltoforward If you're in Mountain View, check out http://balancedmv.org/ http://balancedmv.org/ and https://www.facebook.com/mvhousingdiversity https://www.facebook.com/mvhousingdiversity If you're in SF, https://www.facebook.com/BARentersFed https://www.facebook.com/BARentersFed and www.sfbarf.org Menlo Park: https://www.facebook.com/MenloParkNoOnM https://www.facebook.com/MenloParkNoOnM