Being mad at the buses and their occupants has always struck me as misplaced and absurd - shooting at them is just crazy. And yeah, they’re “just” workers - but when the starting salary for an Apple engineer is twice the US average household income, it’s part of the income disparity screwing up the Bay Area.
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Oligarch problems are so sad!
I don’t think the cutting edge philosophical revelation of “rich people can have much nicer things if they don’t have to share them with the rest of the rabble” is lost on anyone here…It’s more a matter of whether that contributes to a just and equitable society…
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If the view of The Wrong Sort of People is universally shared by rich people everywhere, as you suggest, then it stands to reason that they wouldn’t want to move in next to any. So, not wrong about that.
There are some great simulations of what happens even in supposedly very diversity-friendly neighbourhoods.
Here, have some fun with this one.
And there’s also this, which I only just found and merely skimmed, but it seems an interesting read.
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That’s better than my Concrete Island take, only with a tech bus jumping the highway divider into isolation and madness hahaha
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NIMBYs often end up cutting their own throats, or at least they try hard to do so. An example near me: back in the late 1990s, a rail-trail on an abandoned right-of-way was proposed. There was some very loud NIMBY opposition, mostly on the “we don’t want them using this trail and ruining our investment” principle, but eventually the trail was built, and their property values surged.
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Just look at the quagmire that was the High Line in NYC. For decades it was crumbling and derilect and now that it’s finally been developed it’s the epitome of neighborhood wrecking gentrification.
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Police should be putting some effort into catching these people.
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As much schadenfreude as I have for the misfortunes of techbros, I’d agree. People who threaten others’ lives are far worse than generic douchebags. It’s not a far stretch for jackasses like the bus-busters to switch to targeting random drivers.
Hell, a freaking Chicago-area college professor just flipped his lid and was just busted for shooting at random drivers in Iowa, for Christ’s sake.
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That’s usually the way it works. It’s the same with the limousine-liberal Boomer bigots who showed up at city council meetings in the People’s Republic of Santa Monica a few years ago decrying the new Expo Line because it would bring “undesirable elements/them” into the community. For a liberal like myself, listening to those meetings on KCRW induced cringing bad enough that I might have crashed my car.
Instead what they’re getting (thanks to sensible zoning and urban planning that spoke to the community ideals those residents couldn’t live up to) is new high-end and high-density condo and rental housing and new retail and restaurants and creative-class offices popping up around every stop, and them coming all the way from downtown without overwhelming the parking infrastructure to earn and spend their greenbacks (which, as it turns out, is the only colour that ends up mattering). And, surprise!, property values on existing single-family homes nearby are going up.
I lived in the Meatpacking District when the High Line was crumbling and derelict and to be honest most of it ran through old light-industrial spaces (which the elevated railroad originally served) converted into (relatively, for NYC) inexpensive commercial office spaces, dive bars, and sketchy clubs. There were places like Pastis and Chelsea Market and some first-wave creative-class renters like me there and a few 2-4 block older Latinx enclaves, but those weren’t really established residential neigbourhoods like Bed-Stuy or Harlem waiting to be wrecked. The gentrification of the Meatpacking District westward from 8th Ave and eastward from Chelsea Piers was already well underway when the High Line was turned into the park.
Which is not to say that the High Line hasn’t had a serious gentrifying effect on Manhattan as a whole, adding mainly more insanely priced luxury condo stock at the expense of affordable-for-NYC rental stock like my old Meatpacking District apartment (the building is now gone). But that’s less the fault of the new amenity and more an issue of the city’s priorities which, at the moment, are still hellbent on turning the island into a playground and safe deposit box for the super-wealthy.
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I have spent time in the bay area, and agree it is screwed up. Luckily, when I am there, my housing and expenses are covered by my company.
Not to be argumentative, but from census data (via wikipedia), mean income in the US is $31K, and the mean for persons with a MS degree is $71K. Those numbers seem high to me, so I may be misreading them. But any industry that requires high technical ability is going to pay those people pretty well. But also, it would be logical that large businesses like that would also employ lots of support staff, from HR people to the folks that bus the tables in the cafeteria. Maybe the issue is that Apple and Google have a much higher than normal percentage of higher skilled and paid workers, which upsets the normal balance of living costs. But that is all conjecture on my part, and might be totally wrong.
At any rate, I don’t think the people attacking the buses have really thought out what they are likely to achieve by their actions. Unless it is terrorism, in which case seems to be working as planned.
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One thing I don’t understand is why there aren’t ferries from Oakland and Alameda and San Francisco going south to Silicon Valley, with short-hop light-rail lines or just buses from coastal terminals into Redwood City, East Palo Alto (Facebook), Mountain View (Google) and perhaps San Jose. More NIMBYs? Unworkable geographic features or rough/shallow waters? Too much port traffic? Unrealistic expectations for Caltrain and BART?
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The Dumbarton Strait is pretty shallow so I’m not sure it’s particularly workable for ferry traffic. There’s been various proposals going back decades to have some sort of commuter rail service in the area, but it’s been largely stalled.
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Household income, I meant to say. A starting salary for an Apple engineer is six figures. When you have a large number of people being paid at least two or three times what other people are getting paid, it throws off the ability of everyone else to live there. This didn’t used to be the case, back when US income taxes were higher. Now, if your household income is less than six figures in the Bay Area, you’re considered “low income.”
South Bay is all wetlands. Ferries can’t get very far South. (There was some movie years back that had, as a key plot point, something coming through the “port city of San Jose” that caused much merriment here.)
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Seattle is that way now. When I first moved here the Mrs could drive a short bit to a park and ride and take one bus over to Redmond. We even nearer to the stops on that now gone route. Now it would be two buses 1.5 hours and $7.50 in fares one way which is a why should I bother as with the gas mileage on the Prius and even counting the bridge toll and car wear it is cheaper.
ETA and it isn’t much of bother for me to go around the north end of the lake from where I live so I can avoid the toll too.
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Good thing ST-3 is gonna fix all our traffic problems here, right?
*headdesk*
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I love the light rail but goddamn it I will ready to fucking retire by the time it will be useful for me to use a commute option.
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As someone who works at a fully remote company (there is no main office), this is easily solved by visiting a local co-working space.
It’s a complex situation. More jobs are here but housing stock is decades behind. Prop 13 completely disconnected home prices from property taxes (and had a huge loophole for corporations to also benefit). Home owners simply have no incentive to keep housing prices in a sane place. Many areas should be upzoned to include more density, but see how the cities were redlined in the past. Folks will fight tooth and nail against anything that goes against the “character” of the neighborhood.
I will vote for folks who will build more, and will make building easier. More choices means better rents, shorter commute times, and more transit options with increased density. Wishing for the economy to collapse or for tech to magically go away is ridiculous.
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FYI: I just added a General catch-all thread on urbanism-related issues here:
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