Definitely an article for Sadly, this is not The Onion.
If you want to sit on the grass at Dolores Park, please contact me for rental prices or place a bid on Rentberry. Cash only, please.
(Ahh, Frinkiac, you may yet prove indispensable.)
“Ethnic cleansing?” Seriously, @Doctorow? Hyperbole much or is gentrification really the same as, say, genocide in the Balkans?
neighborhood kids pushed out by techies who don’t have the money or the technology to book the fields where they’ve played all their lives.
GET AN EDITOR, Cory.
I can see charging a fee for facilities, we used to pay them for softball and my dad coaches several kids teams and all the fields require fees. Seems to me that they defer some of the operating costs of the park.
Also requiring registration for use only makes sense for things like play fields or even BBQ pits or the like.
Doing it online excludes some folks. Sorry, it’s inevitable when technology changes the way information moves or is recorded that people who refuse to or are unable to adopt the new technology are left out. Go to the library, they have computers there.
Lastly: If this is a public park charging for sitting on the grass or riding a swing or whatever is absolute fucking bullshit and I would probably sabotage the park out of rage if it was in my neighborhood.
If you want your own piece of grass for the day, you’ll need to pay a $200 security deposit and as much as $260 for the turf itself.
Hackerspaces like Noisebridge were gentrifying the Mission a decade ago. It was the early techno artists and coders that Boing Boing chronicled in the early 2000s that paved the way for techies in 2016. The problem with defining gentrification is that the gentrifiers are only the people who came after you.
“Urban pioneers” are the folks who make a neighborhood safe and desirable for gentrification. It is part of the life cycle of neighborhoods (been through it a Few times over the years)
Yes, it’s all those horrible non-profit educational institutions intended for public benefit that are ruining the neighborhood for everyone. For shame.
I’m confused. This is a public park? I thought public lands were paid for by tax dollars and thereby by definition available for the public. Wouldn’t this be the precursor to having pedestrian tollways? You can walk to the grocery store for free, but you have to go 6 blocks up and through a shady neighborhood, or you can pay a few cents and walk up the street.
Hmmm, I bet that would make me a mint… excuse me while I got find investors for my new startup.
A conservative and a libertarian are having an argument, and the conservative – having had enough of the libertarian’s permissive attitudes toward everything – finally is too exasperated to finish: “You libertarians would let people shoot drugs and fornicate in public parks!!”
The libertarian’s jaw drops: “PUBLIC Parks?”
copy and pasting the shit out of that joke!
I did assume it was a joke/art piece about gentrification. Jesus.
Those poor, deprived Google employees. 
Won’t someone think of them for a change?
I’m writing an app to allow for bids on that rent.
Wait, wait, wait. You’re telling me I can just put up a sign directing people to my website, where I ask them to pay money for the thing that they already had a right to, even when I don’t have a right to sellit… and they’ll do it?
Why the fuck did I go to college? I know what I’m doing with the rest of my life.
Yes, yes, after checking it out, I believe it belongs to SF parks & recreation as described. I also believe that if I started SFparks.com and put up a sandwich board, no one would know the damn difference.
I was at a lunch counter when I fell into a conversation with a guy who was waiting for a lunch meeting. He said he had an app. (Sure, sure, another.)
“There are lots of temporary workers needed by a variety of industries… for example, waiters who aren’t employed by a hotel, but are on file as acceptable contractors when they need to hire 40 people for a convention. My apps helps connect those businesses with those people, so they can track all the opportunities from one place, and know exactly what’s being offered at each.”
“Well, that sounds useful.”
“And if you have a limited need, you can require those workers to bid on the job, so that you can get the lowest cost. And you can rate workers, see their ratings, pay less for unreliable workers, over-booking if necessary and bumping a higher-paid but reliable waiter for a lower-paid waiter if he actually shows up…”
“… That actually sounds pretty evil…”
And then I realized half the apps out there were already doing that, just in a larger niche.
I tried, but you have to sign up for a reservation to use them.
In both cases, what we’re seeing is the enclosure of the commons. But it’s not just a question of covering costs or preventing abuse, it’s a system for granting selective access to what used to be a universally accessible resource.
When too many people want to use a resource, some are going to miss out. You show up to the park and all the spots are taken, so you have to picnic somewhere else.
The problem in SF is that rich and important people sometimes have to picnic somewhere else, because people far less rich or important than them managed to get a spot first. The guiding wisdom of Silicon Valley says this is irrational, and should be disrupted by applying free market principles to achieve optimal monetization of green space.
What we’re left with is a situation where the resources are technically still public, but in practice they’re merely private resources administrated by the government.
Land of the free … market.
Public spaces paid for by taxes, usable by the general populace = clearly communism, can’t have that here …
