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That was a horrible article. Cutler wrote a lot of words, and presented a lot of (dubiously researched) "facts" (interspersed with bald assertions), but I defy

by timr 12y ago

That was a horrible article. Cutler wrote a lot of words, and presented a lot of (dubiously researched) "facts" (interspersed with bald assertions), but I defy you to find a coherent thesis in the piece, other than "it's complicated...but it's wrong to blame my industry, because it's complicated." The thing read like a bad undergraduate essay, wherein the student decided the thesis ("tech isn't really responsible for the bay area housing crisis!") before doing the research, discovered that the data didn't support her conclusion, then simply chose to overwhelm the reader with disconnected facts in an attempt to distract from the self-evident conclusion that, yes, we really are responsible for the latest spike in housing costs. A more sophisticated analysis acknowledges that foregone conclusion, but then separates culpability from cause: the tech industry is certainly the cause of the latest housing crisis, but that doesn't mean growth in tech is automatically bad (or good, for that matter). Only once you have acknowledged those truths can you proceed forward with a rational discussion on what to do about the problem.

viscanti 12y ago
The article wasn't horrible. While it doesn't have any takeaways as far as next steps, it does introduce the idea that things actually are complicated. It's the start of a dialogue beyond just pointing at tech companies. It brings up points that need to be considered in what actually is a complicated situation, and that's better than pretty much everything else that has been written about the subject.
- timr 12y ago
  The article doesn't go "beyond just pointing at tech companies" -- it tries to paint a picture where the obvious, principle causative agent (the tech boom) isn't responsible for the housing problems in San Francisco. Instead, it must be NIMBYs, or zoning, or owls, or...anything but just acknowledging that we've crammed a bunch of very wealthy tech people into a very small city in a very short time (circa 2007). Once you acknowledge that this is an acute crisis caused by a single industry, you have to consider that one reasonable solution might be to discourage tech companies from coming to the city via taxes, zoning and so on. There is, after all, no inalienable right for startups to have offices in live/work lofts in SOMA. Again, the whole thing was written to appeal to an audience of tech people who want to believe that they're not the problem and shouldn't have to sacrifice, even though the facts clearly point in the other direction. Why should the fabric of a city change instantaneously because a group of relatively entitled new arrivals believe that they somehow "belong" more than the people who arrived before? We can't have a useful conversation that doesn't start from the acknowledgement that tech is a big part of the problem.

by timr 12y ago

viscanti 12y ago

The article wasn't horrible. While it doesn't have any takeaways as far as next steps, it does introduce the idea that things actually are complicated. It's the start of a dialogue beyond just pointing at tech companies. It brings up points that need to be considered in what actually is a complicated situation, and that's better than pretty much everything else that has been written about the subject.

timr 12y ago
The article doesn't go "beyond just pointing at tech companies" -- it tries to paint a picture where the obvious, principle causative agent (the tech boom) isn't responsible for the housing problems in San Francisco. Instead, it must be NIMBYs, or zoning, or owls, or...anything but just acknowledging that we've crammed a bunch of very wealthy tech people into a very small city in a very short time (circa 2007). Once you acknowledge that this is an acute crisis caused by a single industry, you have to consider that one reasonable solution might be to discourage tech companies from coming to the city via taxes, zoning and so on. There is, after all, no inalienable right for startups to have offices in live/work lofts in SOMA. Again, the whole thing was written to appeal to an audience of tech people who want to believe that they're not the problem and shouldn't have to sacrifice, even though the facts clearly point in the other direction. Why should the fabric of a city change instantaneously because a group of relatively entitled new arrivals believe that they somehow "belong" more than the people who arrived before? We can't have a useful conversation that doesn't start from the acknowledgement that tech is a big part of the problem.