Artificial scarcity of housing in a desirable city
Lack of public infrastructure
Employers take matters into their own hands
Two choices here:
Blame the people with money, and run them off, so you’re stuck with the same situation you’re in now
Raise taxes on them, or charge companies like Google extra fees for using public bus stops and for not taking passengers
Seems y’all want option 1. Good plan.
Googles trying to keep there employees out of their cars and keep SF streets more clear, but the protestors don’t like that
You seem to think I’m confused about what you were implying. I think my point is still sailing somewhere in the stratosphere above your head.
Oh no, I get that you think we shouldn’t call into question the motives of people who do these things.
Why? Because you think its rude?
Turning up at people’s doors to harass them is rude, worse than that its creepy and threatening. People who behave like that don’t deserve the courtesy of not having their motives questioned.
Not exactly: As a matter of material fact, people either verb or don’t verb. You don’t “allegedly” verb unless there’s a real question among third parties. There’s no dispute that they protested. Why did they protest? Maybe their underwear has too low a thread count- who gives a shit? They did the thing. Their motive is not the issue. Whether they were paid to protest is not the issue. Either they protested or they didn’t. The act of protesting isn’t like lying or being a hypocrite, it’s not contingent on intent.
I have nothing against calling into question other people’s motives (I do it all the time) but it’s not related to your use of “allegedly”. I just happen to feel obligated to point out that people who organize protests can be stupid without any malevolent third party. I feel like the Koch Brothers in particular make bad suspects because this isn’t their fight. Sure, they can be real assholes but sometimes a tree falls in a forest and they have nothing to do with it.
I’m really enjoying this “build, build, build” nonsense. We’re in the midst of a mother of a drought, the freeways are parking lots (even if you’re on a bus) and the air is looking more like '74 than '04. Let’s consider a different paradigm than fetishizing growth. There is one thing in nature that grows and grows and grows: a tumor. Usually to the detriment of the host.
I genuinely don’t understand this rhetorical tactic. “We haven’t seen any proof” - do you live here? Some of the MUNI buses are fitted with cameras that automatically snap license plates and issue electronic tickets to your car, just like a red light camera does. For crying out loud, the linked article says “This might not anger San Franciscans so much were it not for the fact that the MTA does enforce its laws, harshly, against individuals. Several speakers at the hearing had received tickets for the same behavior Google buses get away with daily – pulling into a bus stop to drop someone off.” SF parking regulation enforcement, particularly in primo areas, is swift, harsh, and almost impossible to contest.
And your assertion that the protests were a reaction to talks about charging the shuttles doesn’t hold water. Anger has been building over the shuttles and what they represent for well over a year. Mayor Lee and MUNI just opened the subject of charging the shuttles for stops a month ago.
In a word: No.
But somebody still has to make burritos at the taquerias, run the cash register at the overpriced boutique clothing stores, make the artisanal-roast coffee at the twee cafes where the elite go to network, and clean the locker rooms at the gym, whether that gym is located inside or outside their workplace. Somebody still has to bag the groceries at Whole Foods, operate the dry cleaner’s, and run coat check at the clubs. And when those folks lose their housing, they have nowhere else in the city to go.
In other news: 40% of shuttle riders say without the shuttles, they’d move closer to work.
And what is wrong with that? There is no law that says you need to live x number of miles from your workplace. These companies want to attract talent and making it convenient for the people they are trying to attract to live where they want and still work there is a pretty good strategy. I am pretty sure they have the money to pay for whatever fees are necessary to use bus stops or whatever it is they do that is considered so disruptive.
The report explains the problem with public transport here, the employers have stepped in because the public transport options are broken:
The need for these shuttles is in part a reflection of the region’s fragmented transit services. The Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) operates in four counties but does not currently serve Silicon Valley (San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District 2009). From San Francisco, Caltrain offers rail service to 32 stations between San Francisco and southern Santa Clara County, but many users require a lengthy access trip to reach Caltrain (Caltrain n.d.). The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), which operates Muni, the public transit system for San Francisco, does not offer services outside of the city. SamTrans offers an express bus between Palo Alto and San Francisco, but the route serves only the Financial District in San Francisco and runs hourly (San Mateo County Transit District 2012). The region’s inability to better integrate its transit services has created gaps that the corporate shuttles are now filling.
Suggesting people move closer to their work is silly because without new construction that merely moves the issue of displacement from San Francisco to other parts of the valley. There is of course plenty of scope for new construction but that is being blocked by existing residents in Mountain View, Palo Alto, etc. And building high is very expensive in an earthquake zone.
There are of course underpaid service jobs that are essential for the city to function. Which is why the primary concern for SF public transport has been getting people into and out of the city center at rush hour.
The other major factor that distorts the whole California property market is the idiocy that people who have owned a house a long time are practically exempt from property taxes while people who buy recently get slammed. Blame Ronnie Reagan for that. Nobody will sell in SF unless they are absolutely sure they will never want to return. I have a lot of colleagues here in Boston who own condos and flats in SF that they rent out rather than sell because of that. There are more places that are underutilized or empty.
Low property tax income combined with high taxes on new properties means poor public schools and no money for infrastructure. It is a setup very similar to the one that the french aristocrats set up for themselves before the revolution. In pre-revolutionary france, only the poor people paid taxes. The aristocrats were exempt.
We agree on pretty much everything you’ve written here, particularly regarding Prop 13 and its effects. And that the public transit system has plenty of issues. And that we need more density. But density has a lot of barriers here, as has been well-discussed. And there is little or no incentive for developers to create enough housing to increase the vacancy rate - a low vacancy rate actually serves them well because it keeps rental and sales costs high.
As I wrote at JWZ’s blog:
“Our workers need better mass transit in order to get to work on time from their homes” is a problem that can be solved in ways other than creating a private transit service piggybacked on the structure provided by the public sector. But that would involve paying taxes, [and, I add now as an afterthought, working with government] which Silicon Valley (among others) is notoriously loathe to do.
Paying taxes would, I note, also help with maintaining the roads and freeways that get wear and tear whether by buses or private cars.
“Move fast, break things” as a philosophy has a habit of, well, breaking things. Fine if it’s your product. Not so fine if it’s a whole community.
Someone (in this thread? elsewhere? I have no idea right now) mentioned the idea of the Tech-plexes investing in making the areas where they’re located actually desirable - grants for cultural resources and good restaurants or whatever it is that their employees want within walkable distance. Seemed like an interesting idea, anyway, but it would require, again, thinking about their impact on communities.
I think part of the rub is that google has started its own bus system, which basically says: the SF bus system isn’t good enough. But, rather than helping to make the SF bus system better for everyone, they’re basically opting out.
I suspect the protesters feel its part and parcel of the income divide in the US where people who are doing well economically don’t want to contribute back to the larger society they benefit from.
The Google Bus crosses a county line, which I am pretty sure the Muni isn’t allowed to do.
I don’t know how much of the Bay Area transit history you know, but it’s an ugly story of almost a dozen different bureaucratic fiefdoms that have generally been as concerned with defending their turf as helping citizens move about.
Add in that the folks on the peninsula have been fighting ferociously against both BART and Rail Lines since the 70s, and I really don’t see how Google can be seen as the bad actor here. At least the Google bus gets people off the highways without costing tax payers a dime – more than can said of the Muni or BART. (and I say that as a Clipper Card holder).
Yeah, developers are the saints here…
Two birds, one stone - people can live in discarded IKEA packing cases. I’m pretty sure this idea is already quite popular.
Actually, I was thinking an upgraded version of this, that IKEA already makes:
You wouldn’t really want to LIVE in one though, would you?
Generally the bricks and mortar, so to speak, isn’t the problem, it’s the relative scarcity of desirable real estate. Which is a story of urban sprawl and city centre skyscrapers. I guess a skyline describes a graph of real estate prices. Hmm.
Depends, I’ve seen some very good manufactured housing, that DOES ship flat. Wall units have pre-strung wires, plumbing is built-in, doors and windows pre-hung, etc. Basically, mate the connectors, insert the fasteners, and tighten.
Certainly more efficient, and goes up MUCH faster than traditional stick-built contruction. . .
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