There’s something awfully nasty about hurling “you’re why we can’t have nice things” at people who have virtually no things at all.
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Well, the reason why we can’t have nice things is because the people with no things keep stealing them!
/sarcasm
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startups which provide deluxe on-site benefits could extend their daycare, meal and on-site walk-in health care to people who have WIC or EBT cards
The rich stay rich, the poor get charity, the middle class gets bupkis.
'Twas ever so…
I don’t think that earthquakes are the reason that San Francisco is less dense than New York.
New York simply developed sooner and has a much larger population. New York passed the current population of San Francisco before the Civil War and is now ten times more populous. New York’s population and pre-automobile development lead to a denser pattern of development built around the subways.
Building tall earthquake resistant buildings requires steel frames but those have been available since the 1890s. It has been possible to build taller in San Francisco for a long time. What is preventing further growth in SF at this point is the zoning height restrictions.
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After the dot-bomb collapse and the world-wide housing bubble collapse, San Francisco property values did not even hiccup. Meanwhile, the dot-bomb collapse alone seriously shrank the job market and blew up the business vacancy rate to dust bowl levels.
Whatever drives the property values in San Francisco is entirely unhinged from fluctuations in population, employment and the local economy. It has been this way since property values began to rise in the 1980s. I leave it to your imagination to determine who was/is demanding expensive housing in SF regardless of the state of the local job market.
Meanwhile, the locals have only history to back their suspicion that the majority of the tech workers here in town will not be here to enjoy all the luxury housing being hastily constructed for their benefit.
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You know who most people, regardless of income, don’t want to live next to? Others with antisocial/sociopathic tendencies.
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I lost all sympathy for the alleged protestors after they pulled the stunt where one of them pretended to be a Google employee mouthing off clueless inflammatory claims.
They have since taken to picketing Google employees at their homes.
I am not going to read anything more from the protesters side unless the person posting it has condemned these tactics.
The Counterstrike people are definitely not part of the solution, they are trying to create a problem so they can exploit it. I have to wonder if they are really being funded by Koch money or the like to discredit genuine protestors. But maybe thats because I have a confirmed NSA troll and a strongly suspected NSA mole trying to disrupt my IETF security projects.
Google have already agreed to pay the city for the use of the stops and that was being discussed long before the ‘protestors’ showed up.
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Yeah… the people who are angry need to wise the fuck up and realise that gentrification happens everywhere and is driven by desirability, not income. There will always be someone who can out-bid you. If I was a Google employee I would be as trolly as possible just for the fun of it. The protesters are angry because the government-run public transit sucks. This is not Google’s problem, this is the government’s problem.
Keep up the protests guys, you’re looking more idiotic every day.
Abso-fucking-lutely.
I’m reminded of Jonathan Meades’ constant critiques of preservationists standing in the way of actual human living space.
Not that preservation is wrong, mind; architecture is important, and the style of San Francisco should be integrated in future development. Meades was particularly great on this topic vis-a-vis Aberdeen in his Off Kilter series: he suggested and demonstrated how a place’s “placeness” could be preserved in a tumultuous melange of competing interests, heritages, denominations, etc (by incorporating building materials and architectural flourishes, essentially; by being mindful that, as he put it, “buildings are scenery”).
Aversion to change impedes much progress; NIMBYism is a ubiquitous scourge.
Google isn’t the problem. The SF bay area is so nice because of the tech companies there, not inspite of them. Tech companies pour huge piles of cash directly and indirectly into the economy, allowing all of the non-tech companies to exist. If you want to see what it looks like when all of the companies providing jobs abandon you, just look at Detroit and the rest of the rust belt. Seeing people actively protesting to make their city look more like Detroit or Troy is utterly insane.
If you want to drop the cost of living in SF, allow development. SF is so damned expensive because demolishing a house and putting a big old apartment in its place is very hard and very expensive. Make it easy, and the cost of housing will plummet. Protest the people who put in the current zoning laws, not the people pouring wealth into the city and keeping it from being another Detroit. If you want a magical fairytale land of low cost of living and no tech employees, seriously, move to utopia that is Detroit.
The landlord blaming is also dull. Landlords charge what they can charge. They charge whatever people will pay, rather than running some sort of charity lottery system where they set a price below the market level and pull names out of a hat to decide who gets to live there. This entire “conflict” is idiotic.
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Please, if they do decide to build up- will someone think of parking? I don’t care if you solve the problems with public transit or by building garages, but I feel like it’s always an afterthought that makes simple tasks like running errands a nightmare.
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Yeah dude. The first line of his commentary made sense and then it progressively became a depressing insight into how he thinks.
I hope one day you’re homeless @JoeCalifornia
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This isn’t a new problem and even though about half the people here seem to realize what the obvious answer is somehow there is no political will to actually address the issue:
That’s a completely asinine phrase. Either they are protesting or they are not. “Allegedly” is annoying enough when used by the media in reporting crimes. Let’s not expand a bad practice.
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Homeless people attend school now?
It must be nice having everything you need and being able to lob pejoratives at anyone who hasn’t. Do you have any objective evidence that homelessness = increased crime rate or are you just making shit up based on your simplistic worldview?
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We don’t always want to do the right thing, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it.
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An interesting question is why do all these tech companies need private busses to begin with? Is the BART or Caltrain insufficient? If so perhaps tech companies could lobby for improvements to those systems, it would be a win-win for the whole community.
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I have to agree. Coming from Sydney, which has seen dramatic gentrification in the inner west, I’m hard pressed to understand this issue. It sucks if your rent goes up because your area improves, but private enterprise can’t be blamed for being successful and drawing people to the area. It’s the role of local government to manage housing accessibility, surely?
I’m not saying it will happen, but in politics things go from being impossible to the status quo amazingly fast.
Yeah, these people who are finding themselves “priced out of their home town” did in turn price other people out of their home town a couple of decades ago, and thought it was just peachy back then. Look at the lovely homes they got for nothing! You took advantage of someone before you, now someone else is taking advantage of you. Karma, much?
Forgive me if I don’t think their “plight” is all that severe. After all, the people ** they** depend on to mow their lawns or teach their children live on the other side of the goddamn mountains, a three hour commute away.
Cry me a fucking river.
And take Dianne Feinstein back already.
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