Personally I can emphasize with the sentiment. Even though I don’t think that 20-something programmers in Google buses are personally responsible for the disparity, but the brandless tinted Google buses are a powerful symbol for new class system.
I’ve never seen so much poverty and homelessness before. There’s many major streets where wearing open shoes would be a big no-no, because of used needles lying around in plain sight. Seeing people shooting up on Market Street is pretty normal.
This is a political decision, or set of decisions: https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/. Anytime we want to, we can build as much housing as people want to live in; we just make doing so illegal right now.
You certainly easily can: effectively free (subsidized by tax payers).
The house-the-homeless programs run during the Bush and Obama administrations dramatically reduced chronic homelessness in most of the US, pushing it to a record low per capita.
San Francisco is one of the wealthiest places on earth. They intentionally choose to allow the human rights violation of mass, particularly chaotic homelessness to continue in the city. Morally they own it, period. There are obvious, highly effective solutions that have been used elsewhere.
That's not building cheap housing that drug users can afford. It's just getting someone else to pay.
Deinstitutionalization has contributed to SF's homeless problem, as many mentally handicapped people self medicate with illegal substances.
Where do you put all this new infrastructure and who pays for it? Existing residents?
More housing is necessary but insufficient.
Yes. That's how urban living works. Current residents pay taxes, those taxes are used to rebuild/enhance the city infrastructure, which brings in more residents and more tax revenue.
And I think increasing the capacity of the sewer system is sort of an assumed point when it's literally a requirement for increased high-density housing.
But don’t point that out here! It’s not enough to agree that the area needs more housing—you aparently have to also profess that it’s obviously the only solution, and that there are no trade offs or complexity to consider.
Remote work, distributed working, all these ideas are what could lead a worldwide trend to distribute work, people, resources more efficiently.
Also while not destroying history (old buildings/neighborhoods that are worth preserving) and nature (parks, trees, etc.).
It's pretty widely known with in the transgender community that trans women are overwhelmingly more likely to be software engineers than have pretty much any other profession.
The housing scarcity and high rents are caused by politics, by zoning, by not allowing to build enough new homes. It's sad that techies are blamed for the problem created by the politicians and, ultimately, by the voters.
Especially foreign tech workers, such as the author, bear no blame, as they cannot even vote in any US elections.