It's hilarious to read all these militaristic wordings about techies waging "battles", and "conquering" the city, as if it's about barbarian hordes which came down on peaceful SF, pillaged, raped, and burnt everything to the ground. Sure, why scritinize California's, or the city's political theater, why questioning law enforcement inefficiency. Can it be somehow related to drugs, prostitution, and theft? No, it's all software developers' fault.
Interesting variant of dehumanisation [1] that often precedes the act of taking property without compensation.
The gap between the article's
"the city [the tech workers] fought so hard to conquer", and the reality that is squarely the opposite (tech workers did not engage in violence at all, did not fire a single shot) is remarkable, and scarily Orwellian.
Technology has a transformative effect on society and the way we live. This is why old cities look like they look (built before cars and trains were a thing) and this is why most US cites look like they look (built during the prime of the car age).
Similar things are certainly true for other technology, even for the (tolerated) side products of said technology. Is any single person at fault here? Probably not. They mostly acted rationally within their small horizon, but together they created a problem, even for themselves.
We have similar problems when it comes to markets and global warming. Many individually rational decisions can lead to negative outcomes for the whole.
There is a very good episode on the Omega Tau Podcast on precisely that problem: https://pca.st/t8Yd
The interviewed Scientist Dr. Igor Nikolic focused on the design of a co-evolutionary method for constructing Agent Based Models of the evolution of Large Scale Socio-Technical systems in the TU Delft in the Netherlands and tries to tackle problems like these, where you'd be lost without a more systemic view of the problem.
I appreciate your effort in trying to explain your opinion, but it's unclear how it is related to my comment above. To clarify: it's sarcastic reaction to the story's bias, and shallowness.
Well, in a way it's their fault too. Somebody votes for the city government that thinks the way to handle the problem is allocate budgets to yet another NGO that makes the money disappear and produces a nice report, without actually solving anything. Somebody votes for the government that makes naked people running in the middle of the street the new normal (I am not kidding even a little bit, seen that in SF several times with my own eyes), camping out and excreting right on the city's main street pavements the routine and perpetuates the whole sorry state of affairs for many years. SF is not a poor city, judging by amount of megacorps in there and shiny towers already built and being built. I can not believe making the city not look like a wasteland is a problem of no resources. It is a problem of mismanagement. And this management did not come from Mars and conquer the city. Somebody elected them and keeps electing them.
No, I did not make this claim. What I claimed instead is that tech workers, along with other inhabitants of SF, share the blame for the sorry state the city is in as much as they voted for the people who put it into that sorry state and who are unable to fix it, despite being the city with excellent climate, lots of thriving industry and extremely affluent (by the standards of any other place) population.
I find it amazing that "locals" can get away with blaming "tech workers" for rising rents and homelessness. The rents and the house prices only rise because the wealth that the workers generate is blocked from being used to build new houses.
Because making it more affordable to the poor means increasing the housing supply, which means reducing the price of homes, which existing homeowners hate.
It's called capitalism. So long as property is a free market instead of a public asset this trend will continue. It's not just SF. We're seeing it all over the West.
Housing is not a free market because its supply is artificially restricted by zoning regulations meant to protect the value of current homeowners' properties.
If you wanna get a flat in Berlin it is not uncommon to find 100 other people when you look for a flat.
Technically this is supply and demand at play that pushes the prices into fantasy land. Which means after years you will have locals thrown out of their flats because the prices have risen so drastically that only few landlords will take their tenants side.
Markets don’t value social stabilty and don’t give a damn about who lived there for how many generations and what they did for that place.
Is the rage of the displaced morally justified? Can a system that produces such results be desireable for a society as a whole?
A good way to avoid people being displaced is to build enough housing to meet the demand, however there's lots of (probably well intentioned) efforts which undermine this goal, most of the people voting for these things which undermine this goal are the people who originally live there themselves, so in my opinion the rage isn't justified
"meant to protect the value of current homeowners' properties"
It's probably not that direct. Sure, you could build up and achieve the population density of Hong Kong, but then SF would lose the "little big city" charm that makes it a great place to be.
And as we see in Hong Kong, simply adding housing units doesn't necessarily reduce the price of housing.
So I'd argue the primary purpose of the zoning regs is to retain what makes SF what it is, not just to maximize price per square foot.
> And as we see in Hong Kong, simply adding housing units doesn't necessarily reduce the price of housing.
Do you have more info on that? I'd be particularly curious if the per capta price of housing increased with population at the same rate as places like SF.
Housing is not a free market because its supply is artificially restricted by zoning regulations meant to protect the value of current homeowners' properties.
So, you're argueing that you'll be fine living near a major hog farm in the middle of a city or a couple of major brothels (which are legal in a lot of places around the world)?
There's a big difference between a hog farm, which no-one's trying to build in cities, and where we aren't doing it for the welfare of others, and say what's more commonly struck down, which is affordable housing and homeless shelters which directly improve people's lives, even if it causes a bit of harm to the people who live in the place already
Parent made argument that zoning is the whole problem, is bad and entrenches home owners.
I provided two - albeit extreme - examples, why zoning is important.
Methinks that the consequences of the libertarian arguments of DAMN REGULATION! are quite often rather badly thought through. And that's what I wanted to point out.
Don't want to live near a tannery? Then you probably should be careful, when arguing for the abolishment of zoning and building regulations.
It's a strawman because you are pretending that arguing for less restrictions on residential zoning (allowing the construction of more housing) is equivalent to arguing that distinctions between residential/business zoning shouldn't exist at all.
I can argue for more apartment blocks to be built without necessarily arguing for less regulations on the locations of brothers and hog farms.
> Parent made argument that zoning is the whole problem
Did I though? Or that did I made the argument that some of the zoning regulations contribute to the problem of housing markets being inefficient (which is a subset of the whole affordable housing problem)?
Yes. It is actually pretty simple. A place like SF has the choice between converting the wealth its citizens generate into more housing or higher house prices. It is a political choice.
>A million-plus for a home with $300,000 down? Then when we have kids, $30,000 a year for private school?
This quote totally confounded me. Why is it a given that their kids have to go to private school? If you're optimizing your budget for home-ownership, why not just send your kids to the schools your taxes are paying for?
That the school system sucks is not an unavoidable fact of life, it's a problem that needs to be fixed. I admit, another problem on the big pile of problems that need to be fixed, apparently.
They have both systems. And public system always sucks, because there isn't an unlimited amount of good teachers for all the public offer and, not the same amount of resources. Private schools have better everything because there's competition.
Not true. There are plenty of public systems that work very well, and better than private systems. Just look at health care systems. Schools could be the same, but you have to invest in them. Plenty of countries have excellent public schools.
State level funding is a big one, poor areas get the same funding for local schools as wealthy areas. I don't understand why "progressives" in the US don't support a more egalitarian funding model, it seems like a very achievable goal and compensates for quite a few privileges.
So, this is super specific to California public schools and SFUSD. Norms that apply in Germany or Maryland do not necessarily apply in SF. You can start diving in the very complex issues with SFUSD funding here [0].
Two major points are Prop-13 and the LCFF (Local Control Funding Formula):
Property taxes only re-assess upon the sale of a house (kinda, it's complicated [1]). As such, only ~25% of the budget comes from property taxes [2].
The LCFF is such that Sacremento controls the funding for schools[2]. Essentially, the money comes out of the state and does not stay in the local area. How that money is divied out is, again, really complex.
So, your taxes don't pay for your local school, they pay for the state as a whole (again, kinda, its complicated).
> why not just send your kids to the schools your taxes are paying for?
Because thanks to massive underfunding US public education is ... not exactly what one can expect from a first world country. In some areas children actually only have four days of school because of underfunding (http://www.ladbible.com/news/news-school-switches-to-four-da...).
Data on spending per pupil in the US largest school districts [1] reveals that San Francisco spends $13,718 per pupil. San Francisco spends more per pupil than the US average.
OECD Data [2] indicates that overall the US spends on average $13,084 per pupil on secondary education. This is ahead of 31 of the other OECD countries. Only 4 OECD countries spend more than the US per pupil, and only 3 OECD countries (Norway, Austria, and Luxembourg) spend more than San Francisco per pupil.
Several other sources of analysis of per pupil spending are included below.
Underfunding? The US spends more than the OECD average on a per pupil basis. Why do you think the education system is underfunded rather than extremely inefficient?
"The United States spent $12,800 per FTE student at the elementary/secondary level, which was 35 percent higher than the average3 of $9,500 for OECD member countries reporting data."
When there is not enough funding to provide kids with a 5-day school week and teachers have to buy supplies for the kids with their OWN money, then the system is underfunded.
I'd be interested if that figure included funding for competitive sports teams.
> US public education is ... not exactly what one can expect from a first world country.
As a European, I slowly wonder if there's any public service in the US that meets the "first-world country" standard. Not education. Certainly not healthcare. Infrastructure is also crumbling from what I hear.
San Francisco is not on the high end in the US, but it is suffering largely because of increasing pension and salary requirements. I assume the latter (and likely both) is itself caused by the extreme cost of living in the area.
You're somewhat arguing his point for him. We spend significantly more per student than almost anywhere, and our education is comparatively poor. We spend significantly more per patient, and our healthcare is comparatively poor.
How much we spend isn't a metric of it being good. It's demonstration of failure.
As another European, I wouldn't throw too many stones. It's not like every part of Europe has first rate schools and healthcare, or flawless infrastructure.
I'm not sure there is, really. Having moved to Europe I do miss the libraries in the US, but that was in pretty wealthy areas (Santa Monica, San Diego, etc.)
But the private services can be top notch if you've got the cash.
But is it true at the highest end? If I'm in Russia I can't get a Harvard level education at a private university or in a small nation in Africa I'm unlikely to receive incredible plastic surgery that I could in the U.S. or S. Korea
Try the library in Downtown LA, you may change your opinion :)
Sorry, don't mean to be snarky, I also now live in Europe and miss my hometown library but many of the public ones in cities are glorified homeless shelters now
Well, there were plenty of homeless by the library in downtown San Diego, but it was a really nice library all the same. I went to a wedding there (it's an awesome venue too). And hey, homeless people can enjoy the library too.
Re: LA - I experienced that with the buses. I got a bus from Vegas to LA after Defcon, and then bus 20 (local version of the 720) from DTLA to Santa Monica about 1 AM, and it was mostly full of people sleeping rough. Kind of ridiculous, really - the city pays for a bus, fuel, maintenance, insurance, a driver, etc. and gets a pisspoor homeless shelter, when they could just pay for housing.
Though yet again that's a failure of housing policy... which is exactly what this article is getting at.
I think there's a fundamental distrust of government here in the U.S. that I chalked up to greed until I bothered to glance at the beginning of Tom Paine's "Common Sense" which basically states that government is a necessary evil.
But you are slapped with more taxes and duties there then suddenly your money can't buy enough.
Also, to have much power with money you need desperate people who will do anything for money.
You can get guns and you aren't charge 40% tax on your income even tax on capital is quite cheap in states.
Having money in Europe doesn't mean difference between life and death as it does in US as they've state funded healthcare.
Here you can go down the road and ask them to act in a porn and in return you pay them enough money to fix their whatever health issue they've for which they've no money.
I am not advocating that this is better, I am just pointing it out why some people might like US.
Plenty of places in the U.S. have terrible public schools by developed-country standards. To the point where U.S. tertiary-education institutions are essentially required to compensate for the terribleness with ubiquitous remedial and GED-like courses that are essentially unknown elsewhere, where secondary education does the job properly.
it’s a big country, i don’t know how it compares with all of Europe as far as schools. Schools in Chicago area, for example, are great and there is a big choice of public and private.
The root cause here is that "thanks" to decades of neoliberalism and privatizations tax revenue and thus the financial base for investments has eroded.
Afaik the best health care in the world is only available in the US? Meaning the type of treatments you can get. Whether you can afford them is another question.
Yeah but it isn't, it is available in the US. The claim was that health care in the US sucks. It presumably doesn't. Only the insurance situation sucks (I guess - I am not in the US). The service itself is good.
Is that so bad? Schooling is a waste of time anyway, this way kids have more free time and they can enjoy their childhood and learn some new skills on their own.
> Schooling is a waste of time anyway
> enjoy their childhood and learn some new skills on their own.
Sadly most kids wouldn't "enjoy their childhood" without school. Schools aren't just about useless assignments, it's a social framework that prepare you for life; learning, the scientific method, living/working with people you don't agree with, doing tasks you don't want to right know but which end up beneficial in the mid/long term, entering a community, &c.
You need a minimum set of tools to be able to navigate in life and most people aren't going to learn these by themselves. Some people have great families/local communities which can play this role but I doubt it's the majority.
None of that needs to happen in a $50k/yr private school though.
What makes you say schooling is a waste of time? My kids in an East London comprehensive have come out with a great, rounded knowledge set and a whole set of interests I wouldn't have been able to inculcate into them, plus some rather cool friends.
I’m sure “kids just learning some new skills on their own” is a perfectly cromulent system.
Universal public education is one of America’s greatest achievements and a tremendous equalizer. At school children learn to socialize, and history, and the arts. They play sports, and get in trouble, put on plays and sign yearbooks.
And it’s a tremendous thing we do that should be encouraged and valued.
I generally agree with the "school is a waste of time" sentiment, except that it does mean an additional burden for parents who now have to deal with carers for their kid during the work week.
When I first visited 7 years ago, it was already an insufferable combination of homeless detritus and Java talk at dive bars. I was finally able to find the alternative scenes the city was [previously] famous for, but all around was an encroaching sense of 'other' smothering the unique identity of the city. And the rent was already too damn high. Soon after, Oakland was being inundated by its escapees. I felt badly for the locals, but more than anything I wanted never to live there. I would work as a high school network admin in Ohio before I would join the tech gold rush.
I've been mostly happy on the east coast, but gentrification's steady gears are erasing local culture here too. I'm pretty sick of cities now - the noise, crime, filth, expense, lack of green space and clean air. But terrible public transportation outside of cities requires paying the ecological, monetary, and in-convenience costs of cars. Suburbia has its own negative effect on society, by drawing away tax revenue from cities and abandoning small businesses. 'Escaping' would come with its own costs, and only help myself.
I don't see a clear solution, but it has to start with a focus on improving society as a whole. More and better public transportation, housing, food, and education will greatly help things, but it needs to be integrated everywhere; not doled out like alms, or in whatever the highest taxed county is. We need a balance between the selfish act of consumption and the hard work of improving society for other people, which will actually benefit us more in the long run.
European here. My girlfriend and I are excited to do a tour of the West Coast later this year. As a tech I feel it would be silly to skip San Francisco and Silicon Valley, but I must say the stories I have been hearing have dampened my initial enthusiasm considerably. I now wonder if it is worth our while. If "avocado toast and class warfare" are the main attractions nowadays, we can probably spend our time more wisely.
I did a similar trip last year. San Francisco can be a charming city at times, I especially recommend doing a bike tour across the golden gate bridge via the golden gate park. Alcatraz was interesting to visit too.
Just beware that it is a pretty run down and dirty city. The streets downtown are full of homeless people who seem to be not all there. I've never felt as unsafe in any city as when walking in downtown SF in the evening, it's very counterintuitive if you're used to downtown areas in Europe. Also avoid public transit at night.
On the other hand there are many nice places around the valley. I think that's the only thing I miss from the valley, drive 40 min in any direction and you're either in a forest, a desert, on top of a mountain or at a sea side. I live in berlin now and it's quite the opposite, the city if full of life but the nature sucks for a good 200km radius.
I also remember remote hiking trails going up the hills south of mountain view but I can't place them on the map. They were always empty, best place to chill and get out of the stressful environment.
To be fair, 200km - which is quite a distance for a small country like Germany - around Berlin includes a LOT of nice nature areas, e.g.:
Baltic Sea, Mecklenburg Lake Plateau, Saxon Switzerland, Harz, and many more.
SV is really just office buildings. They don't have formal tours for visiting engineers or anything like that. Most of the campuses don't even have a visitor center.
As a tourist SF you get to avoid most of the really bad aspects of SF a bit but I don't really think it's a good tourist city. There's just not a whole lot to see that you can't see anywhere else.
To counter some of the suggestions elsewhere:
- The bridge is just a somewhat visually appealing bridge and it's often difficult to see due to fog.
- Muir Woods is a nice place but it's so heavily trafficked it feels more like a garden than a forest.
- Land's End is mainly special for its' view of the bridge I think.
I'm being a bit negative but these aren't bad sights and I don't regret going there as a bay area resident, I just don't think they're special enough to take a substantial amount of time out of an international trip.
I'd suggest: If you're after cities, head to the bigger ones like LA, New York or Chicago. If you're after culture and/or history go to the east coast (I think DC is probably the best place, it has the Smithsonian after all). If you want food, go south. If you're after natural beauty, the best places are pretty far from major cities (e.g. mountains, grand canyon, yellowstone).
Most of what you are reading is basically fake news. Yes, there are homeless in SF, but overall it’s a beautiful city and it’s surroundings, check out Muir Woods
The Bay Area is absolutely worth visiting. The Computer History Museum alone is a must see if you're into that sort of thing.
The wealth inequality and housing crises don't make it a bad place to visit any more than New York, London, or any of the great cities.
People wouldn't complain about the changes in their home regions if they didn't love those places. There are many things about SF and the South Bay that make them really wonderful places: climate, natural attractions, cultural attractions, etc. And those things are very much available to tourists. The dystopia only starts when you try to find an apartment.
As someone who lives in NYC but visits San Francisco for work, the homeless there are a lot more visible. I see homeless people in NYC for sure, but the numbers in San Francisco are staggering.
I can’t name a neighborhood like the tenderloin.
That being said, I don’t feel particularly threatened generally (although I am a tall man), but it is depressing.
In NYC I don’t mind tossing out a buck here or there, but in San Francisco it just feels too innumerable to even start.
As someone who has been to San Francisco enough to hate it there (which doesn't take that long, really), I still think a couple of things are worth seeing:
* Land's End (just outside the city) is beautiful, and worth a visit
* The Palace of Fine Arts Theater (not a theater, rather a sort of "monument" made to look like old-world ruins) is very pleasant, and in a pretty area.
* I've heard the Presidio in general is really nice, but I haven't gotten a chance to go there.
After that, I recommend hopping in a car, and driving away from San Francisco along the Pacific Coast Highway. You've seen the best parts, and hopefully avoided the various near-stabbings or human-excrement-piled sidewalks that are emblematic of the city's current state. It's basically a corporate monument to income inequality, on its way to being transformed into some version of an 80s-future dystopia.
I’d probably add Telegraph Hill and Alcatraz. But, yeah, mostly the Northwest of the city. Unless you’re really into architecture I’d avoid downtown and surrounding except for maybe the Ferry Building.
Because solutions that work (Free mental health care, free housing, more social workers) are not palatable to the people who live there, despite the city having more than enough money to actually pay for those solutions.
It's hard to imagine surrounding cities are different because of free mental health care, free housing, and more social service support for homelessness.
Homelessness is not a problem that affects all cities alike.
It's not the case that Daly City, Mountain View, Pleasanton etc, have all solved the problem without telling SF how to do it. In reality, the surrounding cities simply don't have the problem for various reasons and environmental factors, so they don't need to solve the problem in the first place.
My experience in very poor metropolises across the plamet is that it's an entirely simple problem to solve. My experience in some of the most expensive cities on Earth is that providing housing for the poor devalues the only nestegg most people have and is widely railed against by the masses.
Its a Ponzi scheme first and foremost, housing simply cannot outpace wages, it's impossible.
When it all comes crashing down is someone elses problem though hey :)
Versus the outlying suburbia? Because it's harder to get around in suburbia. Cities are easier to walk / ride your bike around and you're just a face in the crowd. People notice you if you're camped out in a suburban shopping mall.
Or versus another city, it's the weather. Never hot enough to turn you into jerky, never cold enough to turn you into a popsicle.
Since piles of people dead from exposure isn't a risk, the city doesn't have the same motivation to build shelters like a New York does, so they kick it to the side.
The citizenry gets concerned with poop on the street, but once it's bodies, they really expect the government to do something.
So, now that the government can safely do nothing, why won't the private sector fill in?
3 part answer:
1) my understanding of the political lean of the city is that the government is the great social savior.
2) most private groups who take care of the homeless and otherwise destitute havehistorically had a religious affiliation.
3) private groups have to deal with the same real estate prices as everyone else, and because of 1 and 2 and the general skepticism of religion by the citizenry, they won't be given any tax breaks or land price cuts, meaning they simply cannot afford to setup service.
It really is a self feeding system of misery-but-not-enough-to-kill-you all the way around.
There is literally no money in it, so obviously the private sector isn't going to do anything. You might get a bit of "third sector" charity, but it's always inadequate wherever you go.
In my city if I were homeless I'd want to be central not in the suburbs. There are better services for homeless, more other homeless people to blend in with, opportunities to beg, places to find shelter etc.
As of July 2019, there is no know way that cures drug addition with even moderate degrees of success.
Indeed, even the very definition of addiction is still
controversial. From [1]: "[D]efining addiction is not an easy task
and still represents a considerable source of scholarly dispute. The
term addiction has been and it is still used in at least three
different ways. [(i) I]t is used as a lay term, which entered the
English language in the late sixteenth century (maybe owing to
Shakespeare) to indicate inclination or proclivity for certain habits
or activities, in both its positive and negative connotations,
including excessive drinking and smoking. [(ii)]Since the late
nineteenth century, addiction is also used as a medical term to
indicate pathological, compulsive drug use [...] [(iii) A]ddiction is
used as a psychological construct to indicate a compulsive
motivational drive [...] Instances of all three meanings abound in
the scholarly literature, sometimes within the same paper."
OTOH, drug dealers, too, obtain economies of scale by concentrating drug users in close physical proximity (and vice versa). It seems to be plausible to assume that the easy availability of drugs is itself causally contributing to drug use and drug addiction.
[1] A. Badiani, Is a 'general' theory of addiction possible? A
commentary on: a multistep general theory of transition to addiction. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24888430
"It should be noted that Zoe, who asked not to be identified by her real name because she was not authorized by her employer to speak to the press, is not the stereotypical tech bro who moves to San Francisco for a job and immediately starts complaining about the city’s dire homelessness crisis. She arrived in 2007 to study at San Francisco State University and had a career in musical theater before attending a coding bootcamp and landing a job as a developer advocate at a major tech company."
Um, how is she not exactly that? Except that she is a girl, so I guess not a bro. What would you say to girls? "Tech chick"? Or just "Tech sis"?
"It’s just not sustainable for a couple to live here"
Then don't? I write this as somebody who also moved away from his hometown and now can't afford to go back.
"she says she is terrified to walk at night."
And how exactly did Tech workers cause that?
Is there even data showing the homeless and drug addicts are former residents of SF, who were then displaced by rising housing costs because of tech workers?
I don't know why SF with all its money can't get a grip on the problem. But it also seems likely to me that many homeless were simply attracted by the rich people, who can donate more than people elsewhere?
What's the overlap between techies and San Fran's politicians and politically active individuals who prevent the necessary steps from being taken regarding housing policies?
EDIT for clarity: What percentage of those responsible for the horrible laws there were actually techies?
