If you’re protesting against a corporation for abiding by the law in every way and taking cars off the road at their own expense, when the real party to blame is the government for not providing adequate public infrastructure (which is their job) then I’d say my charge is fairly well earned.
Still struggling to understand how inadequate public infrastructure is the fault of one, or a handful of companies… companies who add huge sums to SF city coffers.
Edit: Whatever class warfare you think I’m bringing in here it’s worth pointing out that I have no dog in this fight. I just think the blame is being misplaced.
The thing that is most pathetic here is not the fake Google shill, or the ridiculous ranting of commenters about the validity or perfidy of such actions, but is in fact the sheer waste of time that sites like boingboing have become. A vast swath of the internet that I fondly remember being mostly about culture , art, and humor seems to have collapsed into repetitive sounding boards for whatever stupid news arrived in their inbox that day. If a repulican shits the wrong color, or a corporation makes one perceived mistep, the “left” blogosphere is there to scream it out like a vengeful town crier, and if a democrat or whitehouse official, or a non profit company, says something deemed incorrect by the “right”, the charges of racism or double standards will fly post haste.
Everyone, read what you want, give it some thought, ingest it,and then, if you have nothing to add please just shut the fuck up. All of you, from the union moron to the editors of boingboing to the Google defenders, are just a waste of bandwidth.
One major problem is that rent control only applies to units built before 1970. This means that there’s been a concerted effort over the decades to destroy (often with “oopsie” fires) or otherwise take units from that period off the market. The reaction has been to try to preserve as much of the older construction as possible, making it hard to replace. Part of it, of course, is richie-riches shutting down any attempt to make even the slightest alteration to their skyline.
The other major problem, though, is that the suburbs are made extremely unattractive because there is not good 24-hour transit options into or out of SF: everything pretty much shuts down at midnight.
Sure. And let’s do the math: 500 units renting for $2000/month = $1,000,000/month = $12M/year = $120M in ten years. A ten year ROI, with a lot more to follow (a decent building can last 40-50 years without major upgrades). If they’re not building such complexes left and right, then some sort of law is preventing them, but it’s not poor economics.
You are assuming 100% occupancy, not allowing for tax, insurance, maintenance, interest on the mortgage, management costs, etc. I was also giving that as a construction cost figure - the land would be additional to that, assuming you could find a parcel large enough, appropriately zoned, the city agreed to the project, and it is located in an area people actually want to live in.
It’s a good long term payoff, but you have to be able to tie up major amounts of capitol for 10 to 30 years - typically the dividend is minimal throughout the life of the mortgage, and a complex set of requirements must be met.
Now, if you had $100 million to invest would you sink it into an apartment complex and wait 30 years, or would you invest into stocks, bonds, mf’s, mm’s, cd’s, etc? Right. So that’s why you don’t see massive apartment complexes popping up all the time.
Typically if you want to invest that kind of money into housing, you build houses.
UPDATE: Rodriguez writes that the “Google employee” was in fact a union organizer, staging a confrontation.
So, a union planted a fake outraged Google employee and people in this thread bought his ultra-phony rant hook, line, and sinker because of confirmation bias.
Yep, I’m on Boing Boing.
Edit: And I totally agree with bukowski3030. Boing Boing used to be really interesting. Nowadays it flip-flops between shilling for various interests, and concern driving trollies–and concern driving trollies on things that more often than not end up being thoroughly debunked, only to have the readership predictably double down and dig for reasons why it’s okay to have this kneejerk reaction to this fake thing because it totally represents something that’s real, we swear. I mean…I don’t like being lied to. I’ve been lied to. This is the same reason there are idiots who go “LOL AL GORE” when climate change is brought up; Al Gore lied, therefore it’s fake. If you’re willing to lie about this, how can anything you say be trusted?
The story here is really this: private companies run private buses in SF, some people are pissed about it and pissed that having more upper-middle-class people around raises rent, and a protest with a fake Google employee happened to try to raise awareness of the practice. And companies like Google have been trying to get the city to issue them permits to use muni stops. The End.
At this point, I’d take more posts sneering at me for going to church. At least BB readers honestly hate me for that.
Right now, in various parts of the world, there are people finding real-world solutions to problems related to hunger, climate change, food deserts, you name it, but y’all are too busy being champagne socialists, a bunch of people as white as me pretending to understand the struggles of people who are poor or subject to racism, while sneering at people like me that actually come from backgrounds that you’ve never had to experience.
Congratulations, you’ve missed the point entirely.
Google’s buses (and Apple, ebay, and others) DO interfere with public buses use of their stops. They stop there without the $200 penalty any of us plebes would get for parking our car there to pick up or drop off someone.
They also facilitate sprawl - rather than encouraging their employees to live close to work, they make it possible for people to live in SF and commute to Silicon Valley. Where the buses stop, property values and rent costs shoot up because they become desirable areas to live for people who have far more money than the current residents of the area (see: SOMA, the Mission).
They also create a two-tier system: techno-elites get to ride to work in quiet, clean comfort with wi-fi and few distractions. The plebes suffer with the broken-down, overcrowded MUNI system and Caltrain and BART. If the Silicon Valley folks wanted to facilitate their people using public transit, they could pay to support PUBLIC TRANSIT, but the Liberatarian uber-lords can’t stomach the idea of actually supporting the whole community, so they just offer elite perks to their chosen ones.
They stop there without the $200 penalty any of us plebes would get for parking our car there to pick up or drop off someone.
Maybe that’s because it’s a bus?
DO interfere with public buses use of their stops.
Wait, employees of tech companies are not members of the public now? Their taxes pay for the public bus stops too and as such you think they’d be allowed to use them.
They also facilitate sprawl - rather than encouraging their employees to live close to work
People will live where they want to and if these busses weren’t provided people would still fucking live there. You’re arguing that people live in SF as a result of these buses, rather than these buses exist because people want to live in SF.
Where the buses stop, property values and rent costs shoot up because they become desirable areas to live
How does this argument differ for the location of the public bus stops which are the same stops? People live near transport… because transport.
They also create a two-tier system: techno-elites get to ride to work in quiet, clean comfort with wi-fi and few distractions.
Oh, you mean, like aeroplanes? That will never catch on amirite?
If the Silicon Valley folks wanted to facilitate their people using public transit, they could pay to support PUBLIC TRANSIT
They don’t want to facilitate “their people” using public transport… thats why they bought busses. Nonetheless they already support public transit by paying taxes. If you’re upset about how shit public transit is then maybe you should take it up with the people responsible for managing it? Your use of constant pejoratives merely expresses how butthurt you are by this and your inability to comprehend that companies sometimes offer perks as a sweetener to working with them. Next you’re gonna be telling me that Google should be letting all of SF into their offices to chow down on the free food of those elite tech scum.
Did you read the whole comment thread or just fire off a reply at the first thing you disagreed with?
A) There is a difference between idling and parking. You won’t get a ticket for dropping off a passenger in a bus stop, unless you impede a bus in front of a cop.
B) The city is working on a way to charge these companies for using the bus stops. See @aikimo’s previous post.
C) The remainder of your gripe appears to be that private companies are providing perks for their own employees and not the entire public… which, at the very least, you should come to terms with for your own mental health.
There are people who vocally condemn the institution, but I don’t think anyone here actually hates you for going to church.
This sort of passive aggressive combination of broad spectrum insults with the pretense that disagreement makes you some kind of noble martyr, though, isn’t doing you any favors. Why are you still around, if we’re all such contemptible liberal strawmen?
Well, I live in Ye Olde Oaktown, which is Thunderdome without Twitter, so I’ve never actually had to contend with landlords in SF. But shit’s vicious out here too.
As a long term area resident, one thing I find missing from a lot of these gentrification/ silicon valley arguments is a recognition that the suburbs in the valley are complicit in pushing workers to move 40 miles away to live. The lack of residential unit building in towns like Mountain View have made rentals there nearly as expensive as up north, with none of the amenities. These are the same suburbs that are repeatedly opposing transit improvements, such as faster Caltrain service and long distance high speed rail. Meanwhile San Francisco and San Jose are overflowing. I’m not sure what the solution is here, but maybe it would be a start to bring all the area communities into some sort of talks with large employers like Google so these region wide problems can be discussed. The longer they wait to do so, the more companies will start to move their operations up the peninsula (Google is rumored to expanding their SF office) aggravating an already tense situation.
Google sponsoring public buses is a possibility, but it brings up a scenario where the transit commission is now appeasing a bunch of corporate sponsors which I suspect you’d like even less.
As for them facilitating sprawl it’s actually doing the opposite by making it easier for people to live in the city. And it’s certainly more environmentally and traffic friendly than having them drive there.
As long as they’re not interfering with public transit through their use of the stops (which should be doable since public transit already cooperates with itself) I don’t see a real issue.
The dishonesty of this, quite frankly, makes his actions worse than if this had been a genuine human interaction. This guy is totally a turd sandwich, a disgrace to unions everywhere and seriously, “political theater” is that what we call fraud now.
From out of town, are you? MUNI buses carry cameras, which can be used to give you a ticket even without a cop being there.
The city has proposed a seriously weak-ass “please sir, may we have some more?” plan that I fully expect to be crushed by the weight of Silicon Valley’s corporate lobbying might, long after the problem has become so endemic that it is now a major driver of rent.
