Uh, no. The housing sizes were smaller BEFORE they got expensive. I have a friend in Britain, their house has been in his family for centuries, parts of it date to the 1300s. Rooms, halls, everything is tiny by American standards.
On the flip side, he and his wife came to visit, a number of years back: at the time, I lived in a fairly generic, cookie-cutter suburban townhouse, 1800 square feet. They remarked that they had no idea I was rich: to them, it was positively palatial.
Subsidies RAISE the cost of housing: prices will rise to the point where all subsidies are absorbed. You see that in education as well: prices have skyrocketed, thanks to nearly unlimited student loans. . .
Point 2 (transit not being a priority for the offices) could also be due to zoning decisions near the offices in the Valley. Locating near transit may not be feasible, especially at the sizes needed. If an Apple, Google, or Facebook needs a big building, they may not be able to find or build one close to transit.
Another reason for the buses, of course is to extend the productive working day of employees by providing wifi on the buses, etc.
Itâs called a bedroom community. Thousands of suburbs work that way. Whatâs the big deal? Do you think Naperville, IL gets bent out of shape about its residents commuting into Chicago to work every day?
Also, reverse commutes are nothing new. Plenty of people live in a city and work outside it. Itâs not a big deal. Itâs a hell of a lot better than a city that empties out and shuts down on nights and weekends because everyone lives in the suburbs.
Part of the issue is the buses, but thatâs mostly because of the perception that a rich tech company is using public infrastructure in a way that inconveniences everyone else and hasnât been made to pay their fare share. Using public bus stops means potential delays for Muni buses, and if you or I tried that in our own vehicles weâd face potential fines of $271 per infraction. For a community thatâs already been largely displaced through gentrification this just feels like adding insult to injury.
A well intentioned article but individual tech workers volunteering is not going to change the fundamental problem, nor should they take the flack for their employers. The tech companies are fundamentally responsible for their economic impact in the community, just as they would be if they were dumping toxic waste or blaring air horns all night.
Iâm also on the East Coast, so my perspective is also that of an outside â but one who prefers to live in smaller communities that donât change rapidly. Not that SF is a small communityâŚ
[updated for clarity on my perspective, and to remove reference to a since-removed comment.]
But the city was talking to Google about paying for the use of the stops before the first protests began. In fact the protests seem to be a reaction to the payments legitimizing the practice.
Use of the stops is unlikely to cause greater delay to the muni buses than 20-60 extra cars on the road. And we really havenât seen any proof of the city fining people $271 a time for the use of bus stops to pick up or drop off passengers as has been claimed.
No, San Francisco was largely developed before the earthquake risk was know. San Francisco was already about half of its current population in 1906 and it was rebuilt on almost exactly the same plan as it had before the earthquake because they wanted to rebuild quickly. At the time there was no awareness that large earthquakes would be a recurring feature of the region. The first seismic codes were not adopted in California until 1933, by which time San Francisco had reached three quarters of its current population. The full extent of the San Andreas fault was not understood until the 50s and plate tectonics was not understood until the 60s at which point people understood the full earthquake hazard. But by then San Francisco was essentially at its current population and pattern of development.
Volunteering should come out of a generosity of spirit and commitment to the cause or organization. Tech workers shouldnât feel obligated to volunteer - no one should. But it is the employers who do not plan for housing, abuse public services and then demand tax holidays that are the root cause.
Anyone who has ever supervised volunteers knows that it is welcome but fickle: ladling soup is fashionable, then people move to park restoration, then visiting elders. There are often volunteers at the holidays but try finding people over the summer. Many people consider their obligation to a voluntary activity subservient to other kinds of commitments and show up unannounced or do not show up at all. This is fine if they are surplus to need, but that is a rare circumstance. And it is work to supervise them: volunteers often do not have the familiarity with the operation or experience with complex cases to work alone. Not that it isnât appreciated when people give of their time, but volunteers cannot take the place of professionals. The trouble is, professionals can rarely afford to work for free.
It is irrational to continue to cut budgets to pay for the tax breaks given to tech companies and expect the slack to be taken up by volunteers from their workforce. This is inadequate for basic services like handing out sandwiches, let alone the ever more skilled and complex jobs that are being moved from the public to the voluntary sector. And the complexity of many problems increases disproportionately to the length of time they are inadequately addressed.
Maintaining infrastructure will never be fashionable, and it requires full-time, skilled people who deserve to be paid. They deserve to be able to afford to live in the city where they work. So do the professionals who should be providing services instead of volunteers. But there are few jobs for them, and those there are pay so poorly that they force them into expensive, long distance commutes while public transit falls into disrepair. This is a catch-22: Eventually one has to answer the question, âcan I afford to keep my job?â In order to have a city that the affluent want to live in, we need to have a city that middle-class and poor people can live in, too.
Your resentment is justified; I would be pissed too. But it is not the people of San Francisco who are putting you in this position. It is the employers who abdicate responsibility for their impact on the economy of the area. They canât just claim the good and ignore the bad, especially when they are dodging so many other responsibilities.
Tech workers should not feel compelled to volunteer, but they do have an obligation. They are obliged to stand up to their employers, for their community and for themselves. This will be more successful if they ally with the community and both together drag the companies to the table. As long as the ones who are actually in a position to say where people work and how they can get there are getting a free pass, itâs going to continue to grow more complex until we lose the ability to address it at all.
For which they receive goods and services. It is called capitalism.
Detroit collapsed because it was a single-industry town, which is what San Francisco is turning into. If it had a diverse economy, which San Francisco used to, a single industryâs departure would be an inconvenience but not fatal. It also collapsed because the wealthy were already living in the 'burbs, so when the automakers left the tax base was composed of unemployed formerly middle-class autoworkers. âKnowledge workersâ should expect their tax bills to double about 20 minutes after their jobs move offshore. This will be followed closely by the loud pop of the real estate bubble, so I wouldnât count on paying it by selling the condo.
Yeah â I think itâs weird that âcarpetbaggerâ and âscalawagâ have become terms of insult â even (or especially) among people who donât recognize their original historical context.
Words change. The current meaning is an newcomer seeking power/control over their new community.
However, the historical origins were from an out-of-control response to the end of the war. Lincoln was dead and not around to quell the punitive mood of congress. Reconstruction went about as well as post-WWI reparations on Germany. They had a kernel (âcolonelâ ?) of a good idea, wrapped up in an overboard-implementation. And look how well that turned out â Jim Crow laws &c that took another century to deal with.
People are often stupid. What you have evidence of is stupidity. Thatâs it.
Which is not relevant. Either they are protesting, or they are not protesting. You used the word âallegedlyâ badly, sorry there isnât a way to change that fact.
But are those smaller houses more affordable? Iâm not sure what your point is - if you are talking about new units (which was my impression) then a house built in the 1300s doesnât seem particularly relevant. If anything, you contradict yourself by mentioning the affordable townhouse that impressed your friend from Britain.
There might be a lower price tag on a smaller unit, but that does not mean it will be affordable. When vacancy rate is low and rents are rising, additional stock doesnât seem to lead to more affordable housing unless there are policies or agreements in place. Just more units at market rate, or above in the case of luxury buildings.
I should have been clearer in my earlier post. Iâm not sure if subsidies work, and if they do I havenât seen proof of it yet. I just meant to specify how they would, ideally.
I used the term âallegedlyâ to suggest that I think they might be agent provocateurs like the âNew Black Panthersâ. Which remains a strong probability in my view.
Anyone who has ever run a demonstration (and I have run a few in my time) knows that you have to keep tight control on the loonies or they will hijack your demonstration for their own purposes. Either the organizers are incompetent or they intend this type of outcome. Since they havenât come forward to disown the abusive types as a minority, I assume that the organizers endorse their behavior at the very least.
These alleged protesters started with violent behavior. The approach appears to be that Google has to do what they want or they are going to be more violent and more thugish. I am not surprised Google have hired security guards. It is what I would do in their position. And I can imagine the howls of protests from these thugs who turned up at a Google employeeâs house to try to intimidate him as their activities are tracked.
The tactics are so obviously self-defeating that I have to assume that there is something else going on.
I think you will find that any house from the 1300s in the UK is in the millionaire price bracket unless it is absolutely tiny. There werenât many built and most that were built were made of materials that didnât last very long.
Housing in the UK costs roughly twice to three times what similar housing would in the US. So most of the newly built homes are tiny. But that is the same in silicon valley and the prices there are stratospheric. A million buys practically nothing in Mountain View. Which is the reason I live on the other coast. It certainly isnât the Boston winters that keep me here.
Google has tried to diversify out of the valley but it is really hard because that is where a lot of the startups happen. And any company that acquires other companies tends to acquire them in the valley.
Land is a finite commodity and when demand goes up so do the prices.
That was kind of my point for driving pilings into the South Bay, and building, in effect, a city-on-the-pier. Since the Land is gone or off limits. . .build on, well, OVER, the water. . .
