I'm glad not everybody had such a callous experience as mine.
> The homeless problem is not caused by the tech industry
I don't buy either tech nor housing as the root cause, but at the end of the day I didn't really care who to blame, I just wanted to be able to walk down the street without feeling like I was going to get ebola. But nobody felt safe even acknowledging the problem ("How dare you admit that a half-dressed drug-addict screaming sexual profanities at the woman in front of you makes you uncomfortable! Privilege much?"). People just wanted to blame someone or not even open that can of worms.
Are these people in need of help? Yes.
Should they be out in the street while getting said help? No.
Does their presence in the street present a problem? Yes.
Here's just one example: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/09/13/550674476...
Ironically, you're the one being judgemental here.
I agree they need help, but this goes way beyond the deep sadness of seeing really sick people and wishing you could help them.
> This is an insanely privileged thing to say though.
...
The tech industry is doing what it's supposed to - building their business and making money. Along the way it's created a lot of jobs for a lot of people and paid them plenty of money. These are generally considered to be good things. If anything, industry would love lower housing prices because then they could justify paying lower salaries.
That the city can't/won't build enough housing for its inhabitants is the voters' fault, and theirs alone. Every voter in every Bay Area that opposes new construction is responsible for each and every single person rendered homeless due to rising rents.
With that said, it might be worth discussing where the blame for the problem that has been made worse might lie. To aggravate an underlying problem, one has to already exist. So let's talk about that problem, and its causes, rather than casting aspersions on every group who contributed marginally after the fact - that's a very long list, and it's not even a useful list.
Then maybe, having identified the problem and the causes, we can see about solving it. So let's talk about zoning, prop 13, and the way construction permitting processes work and the political systems that support them!
However, I think it might actually be possible to build homes rapidly enough to meet demand. We should at least try, and if we fail we'll have a lot of new housing. That's a nice prize no matter the outcome. What's convenient about this approach is that if we get rid of the political obstacles to construction, we almost certainly can build enough housing!
Failing that, how about we tax people who have helped perpetuate this state of affairs and benefit the most to help address the problem? How about a "created this mess" tax on everyone who has been in the Bay for ten years or more? Maybe they can contribute a little to solving the problem they created, rather than inflicting pain on other people and shouting "STOP HITTING YOURSELF!".
No, that's not a serious proposal. It makes more sense than slapping people with taxes for the privilege of moving to one of the most expensive places in the world, but that is not a high bar.
This is a multi-faceted problem and must be addressed hand in hand with transportation. What if we could house everyone but nobody could get anywhere? Higher density housing along transit lines, better public transportation, etc. are all things we should be working to improve. But we also need to consider the demand side of the equation. Is there a way to even out the demand. What if we build a ton of new high-density housing and the economy takes a major downturn or the tech industry gets distributed to other locales? Will we be left with a bunch of empty buildings that will be a drag on our regional economy and downtown areas for decades?
I feel the biggest immediate relief to the demand issue is legislating tax breaks for companies who allow some large percentage of their workforce to work full-time remote. This would immediately allow people to live in lower cost areas but still take advantage of the dynamic Bay Area tech economy. This is the quickest way to release a little pressure on both housing and transportation while working on the longer term solutions.
* You're completely right. Transportation needs fixing. This is mostly a governance problem, I think. There are too many agencies, too much overhead, and too little accountability.
* Demand management always struck me as needlessly authoritarian. Why do it so explicitly, when prices are doing it for us? And what keeps politicos from going "Well, we convinced a bunch of the evil rich techies to leave. Now they can be replaced by worthy natives! Mission complete!". It would be dangerously politically popular, and lots of local politics tend towards populist and short-term-ist.
Have you looked at how much of SF and the Bay works in tech? Most days, it feels like the answer is absolutely everyone. Yet, in SF the actual number is something like 6% of the workforce. That's half of the number working in finance. If a sixth of the tech workers left SF tomorrow, the population would be replaced within a year or two (recent rates are around 1% yearly). The approach might get some very short-term relief, but without major reform a lot more time would be needed to get long-term changes in place. Never mind the politics of handing tax cuts to tech companies!
Your monoculture concerns are real, valid, and rooted in reasonable worries. You are absolutely right to have them! Yet, they could be better-aligned with reality.
I really wish these two things were bound together.
With that said, prop 13 has wreaked havoc on budgets all across California. School funding is a state-wide problem. And I would go so far as to say that the whole of the Bay Area experiences a housing shortage for what is mostly the same set of reasons.
So while you're right, there may be some commonalities to be found.
Why so? Even if high-paid populations are being shifted around, it's better for the region as a whole to have more highly-paid people. They'll spend more and pay more in taxes (sales, property, income). The pre-existing population presumably owns property, whose value has increased now because it's close to high-paying jobs so they too benefit. This is exactly what has happened in the Bay Area btw.
Yes, rich people will spend more. But this is bad for all the regular people, who can't spend that much, and will be outbid on housing+rent, schooling, childcare, entertainment, etc. Yes, rich people will pay more in taxes, but this is generally bad for all the regular people, because taxes are calculated by averages, so rich people increasing property values also makes property more expensive for everyone else. Yes, more rich people help other rich people demand higher salaries, but literally none of this money trickles down into regular people's salaries, which stay roughly locked to the same dollar figure, regardless. (See how San Francisco has some of the highest salaries in the entire US, but their regular people still had to fight just to get $15/hr wages, which in SF is insultingly low to anyone working in any line of work whatsoever).
> The pre-existing population presumably owns property, whose property has increased now because it's close to high-paying jobs
That's never a safe assumption. Lots of pre-existing populations do not own property. And even for the people who do own property, it's not like those property values actually become cash -- you can only sell out if there's somewhere cheaper to move to. Increasingly, those 'cheaper places' no longer exist anywhere.
We have people being gentrified out of their homes in my small hometown city (Grand Rapids, Mich). And they say what you've said, "who cares, they can just sell out their property, take the money and profit". But in truth, they can't do this. Where are they supposed to live? They can't afford to leave for SF, or NYC, or Seattle, or Chicago. Hell, they couldn't afford Minneapolis. They'd have to live in the literal middle of nowhere to afford something cheaper, and there's no jobs in the middle of nowhere, so it's a non-starter.
This "property owner wildcard" myth needs to die. You absolutely can (and a meaningful number of people will) economically suffer due to development, even if you/they own property in the newly developed area, and even if you/they sell that property for much more than you bought it for.
If zoning allows for building more densely (which in the US, it often does not) existing residents can trade their single-family homes for a condo in the same location + some cash. It comes down to a zoning issue in the end, not some special problem with economically developing an area.
If you evaluate the last 30 years using, for example, TV's or telephones as a benchmark, it looks like we've been amazing at everything, and capitalism is awesome. But if you evaluate the last 30 years using, for example, housing or healthcare as a benchmark, we look like a country that's on the brink of total collapse
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Part of being a free country, is the freedom to abstain completely. The freedom to walk away. Television sets or movie theatres, for instance, can never get too corrupt, or too expensive, because you can always just walk away. There's a limit to how exploitative a transaction can get on many products, because eventually people can just throw up their hands and say "fuck it, I'm out, I'm done with this whole mess".
But you can't walk away from healthcare. You can't opt-out of the housing market. As we transition to exploiting needs instead of wants, people can't opt out, so the potential for exploitation in those particular fields is almost limitless -- limited only by total income.
Just because the previous population can no longer afford to live in SF or many parts of the Bay does not mean we have a problem or someone's rights are being violated.
No, that's not at all axiomatic. Consider a place like Aspen: formerly a small mountain town, now an enclave of incredibly wealthy people. People who support the area have to make a treacherous daily commute from nearby towns, because none can afford to live in the area.
Sure, some people become wealthy from owning land in Aspen before it became famous. Most residents did not.
If all you focus on is tax revenue, median income, etc., everything looks peachy, but that's a myopic view. One can easily argue the same thing is happening in San Francisco.
Even in the case of Aspen, now that the town is an enclave of incredibly wealthy people, there are presumably more jobs in town for locals (largely in the tourism and service industry, but still). If it wasn't a world-renowned ski destination it would be a sleepy mountain town with a limited economy. Most of its young people would have to leave the area entirely to build their lives and careers. So there is still some good with the bad. Some old residents will say things were better before, others will say they're better now.
To the point you made at the end, are you thinking of "average income" rather than "median income"? If median income goes up it means most people are now making more money.
Homelessness is not a trivial problem that can just be solved by throwing a lot of money at it. It's certainly a start in SV though, all things considered.
Rather, tt's a trivial problem that can just be solved by throwing a lot of housing at it.
Incidentally, housing is the one thing that everywhere between Ocean Beach and Diridon are allergic to...
https://www.compass.com/listing/33-day-street-san-francisco-...
I don't understand how someone can believe in something, but only when it's convenient.
Because “social-mindedness” without at least some opposition to Capitalism is meaningless given the scale of problem that Capitalism creates when things like healthcare and housing are surrendered to it.
The homeless problem is not caused by the tech industry, it is caused by the homeowners who have been blocking apartment building construction in 90% of the city for 50 years.