I see no reason why somebody who is currently Founder and CEO of āHey, there should be, like, digg.com but for chicks!ā should exercise the slightest restraint in vicious mockery of those on the losing end of ādisruptionāā¦
(On a more serious note, does anybody have any insight into why he casts The Local as being a figure motivated by a raging sense of entitlement, just founded on different factors than the one embraced by the newcomers, rather than a desire for stability, perception of impoverishment in absolute and/or real terms, nonmarket-oriented cultural factors, and the like? Did artless satire just require a suitably blunt foil, or does the author actually not recognize such motives? It seems almost too myopic to imagine; but I canāt entirely shake the suspicion that it might actually be the latterā¦)
The rich are notoriously devoid of humor.
ā¦what would a successful satire of San Franciscoās natives look like?
Maybe a gifted satirist could write a story featuring some of San Franciscoās most colorful characters. Emperor Norton would be a hoot anywhere, even traversing the Mississippi with a young rapscallion and his runaway slave companion.
Iām not sure I grok this issue. Is it just gentrification? Are they saying techies who work in and around San Francisco shouldnāt be allowed to live there?
There is probably a link between wealth and psychopathic behaviour. If so, wealth and irony would be strange bedfellows.
Let me see if I can help out. I live in San Francisco, and have been to several community meetings on this issue.
Usually when people talk about gentrification, weāre talking about a single neighborhood, or a few neighborhoods. What weāre seeing here is happening across the entire Bay Area, with rents rising at an astonishing rate, along with evictions (up 38% since 2010), primarily Ellis Act evictions (up 170% since 2010), at least in San Francisco. Even with rent-controlled apartments, Ellis Act evictions are allowed by the state, and allow apartments to be taken off the market and converted to condos, or other models where the unit is essentially āsoldā and taken off the rental market. Weāve had some cases of people, especially the elderly, committing suicide because theyāre about to be evicted from their apartments that theyāve had for decades. Home prices also rose 22% during the same period, but I donāt know of anyone rich enough to actually buy a home here- the name of the game in SF is renting, and the latest vacancy rate in San Francisco is somewhere around 2%.
There are several other complaints, for example, many employees commute to Silicon Valley, and their employers use fleets of huge private buses to get them there. These buses use city bus stops, in some cases making it impossible for other citizens to use the city bus stops as intended. This has resulted in some protests and altercations that have made the national news lately. To add insult to injury, we have many people in our city government, especially our mayor, who have made major concessions to some tech companies, like Twitter (to keep them in the city after they threatened to leave). These concessions have cost the city millions in tax revenue.
As Harvey Milk explained back in the 1970s (most people donāt know that he actually had to move out of his famous camera store when his landlord raised his rent over 300% due to this same kind of speculation), this kind of boom raises rents, which lowers disposable income for everyone, which reduces the income for local businesses, and the whole thing just ripples across the area, destroying everything.
Small aside:
Iām a software engineer, and Iāve lived in the city for about seven years, so I moved here before the current boom. But Iām older, and at 50 I find itās almost impossible to find a job with any of these companies. They have a āmonocultureā, where you have to be young, and it helps if youāre white and male. I know this might make me sound bitter, but Iāve found that many tech recruiters agree with me, that many of these companies donāt care about profit, so they donāt care about producing results, what they really want is someone to party with including drinking during work hours, going out every night after, etc., and then flipping the company as fast as possible- they donāt want someone old enough to be their dad around. I survive by freelancing, where people only care about results, and my clients donāt live in the Bay Area.
This monoculture is dramatically altering the city. What we have is a huge influx of young people that in many cases are getting starting salaries of over 100K immediately out of college. Mostly theyāre white, and in many cases they have absolutely no interest in politics at all, and especially politics in SF. Itās like having a gold rush, where almost all of the miners are rich, young, and white- it changes the flavor of the city, and pushes everyone that was there before, except those that are also rich, out of the city. You might have heard about some arrogance in the tech sector, and I believe that part of the problem is because of this monoculture. So many problems could be avoided if they employed some older, more experienced workers or workers that werenāt all young, rich, white, and usually male, so that they could get other perspectives. Instead, they insists on relearning everything the hard way, using bleeding-edge technologies so they can put them on their resumes before they move on in a few months, and unfortunately, usually all of this is playing around with your data.
Iāve edited this to add that I do love being around young people, indeed, I worked at major research universities for most of my career. The problem comes from having a single demographic flooding in and the associated land speculation, wiping away everything that was here before.
As a San Francisco resident, I started to say it wasnāt possible to write a satire about the current situation, but then I remembered Swiftās A Modest Proposal and decided that I thought it could be done, but only by someone as talented and politically astute as Swift. I donāt know of many people in the SF tech sector that possess those abilities.
I donāt know who Bryan Goldberg is, and I donāt think the piece is in the least funny, but I do think he makes his case plain.
Vikram Sethās āThe Golden Gateā is a nicely observed novel-length satire/comedy of manners of the region during the early tech boom. Unlike the specimen of ham-handedness at issue, the satire is delicate, and the characters are recognizably people. That its written in a series of iambic tetrameter pseudosonnets means that its unlikely to be a direct model for anything else. Itās just such a good weird thing that it needed mentioning here.
Seconded. That book is an amazing performance.
I grew up in the Bay Area, and am educated (unwisely got an arts degree without the necessary social skills to really use it) semi-low-income, gay, middle-aged. I donāt feel I can just pick up, and move to a more affordable area safely. My income would be slashed by 70% if I moved to, say, Michigan.
Unfortunately Bay Area residents set themselves up for this fall. The area, especially the city, Peninsula, Marin, Berkeley, and Oakland, is run by anti-growth baby boomers, and has been for decades. Itās almost impossible to build new housing in these areas. Iām ready to buy a (very modest) place to live. Iāve been priced out of Emeryville, Alameda, most of Oakland. The parts of Oakland I can afford are very dangerous.
Yet I see vacant lots all over the nicer parts of Oakland. Itās taken Safeway over ten years to replace an ageing store on the Oakland/Berkeley border thanks to the anti-development people.
San Francisco has become a largely white tech Elysium due to a market failure caused by Lexus liberals.
Itās like a double reverse Worthingtonās Law. http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aF8wLg5Asgo&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DaF8wLg5Asgo
Way to go, Einstein.
do you think it is possible that the āanti-developmentā crowd would be more accurately described as simply being specific (perhaps too specific) about what type of development they thought was appropriate? that they wanted to avoid the typical random free-for-all that typifies American urban āplanningā ? is that a possibility?
A Modest Proposal indeed. It sounds like these lads have been living off the fat pizza of the land for a while: they should be good and plump. <evil grin>
Since no one else has said it yet:
Christ, what an asshole.
Bizarrely, I just got an unsolicited email from some tech startup, looking for someone to write a Ruby API for their super-awesome search engine for a whole $50. How far would $50 get me where you live?
Why not just make that argument, instead of framing it in the form of a question?
Whereas in the South Bay, theyāve been more than happy to abandon reasonable urban planning in favor of adding unrestrained housing, turning the area into a sprawling, unlivable commuter suburb, the worst kind of pseudo-LA, and the cost of housing has still exploded here as well.
