If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too

Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by ghobs91 on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @10:57AM (#19501416)

Outside of having top notch universities, the biggest indicator of a city's ability to have a big tech industry is the size of the VC community.

VCs are largely already wealthy, and SF is a pleasant city to live in if you're already wealthy. As such, they have little incentive to move, and so founders will continue to flock there to start their companies.

I completely agree that shopping around for cities should be easier, so that city governments like SF are forced to get their head out of their ass and make their city competitive.

However, until SF becomes unpleasant to live in for rich people, not much is going to change.

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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by stcredzero on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @12:25PM (#19502572)

VCs are largely already wealthy, and SF is a pleasant city to live in if you're already wealthy. As such, they have little incentive to move

And apparently, little incentive to improve their city and environment. What the wealthy need to realize is that human nature is hard wired to notice relative wealth inequality. Crime and social unrest are directly related to perceptions of relative wealth inequality. Past a certain point, life expectancy is directly correlated with relative wealth inequality, not absolute wealth. [b]

http://www.sfindicatorproject.org/indicators/view/146

https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/02/15/income-inequality-in-...

([b] Ichiro Kawachi, 2000. Income Inequality and Health. In Social Epidemiology. Eds. Lisa Berkman and Ichiro Kawachi. New York: Oxford University Press. Pp. 76-94.)

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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by selectodude on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @11:09AM (#19501579)

There is nowhere on earth that can't be made pleasant to live if you have enough money to do it. More to the point, I'm always confused how VCs actively encourage pissing away their own money on somebody else's rent. Sure, spend your own scratch on an $8 million 1000sqft half-lot house, but why not actively encourage others to make your money go farther.

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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by lotsofpulp on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @11:18AM (#19501715)

No amount of money can fix humidity, lack of sunshine, or lack of mountains/ocean and the corresponding activities possible with them (or whatever other natural feature one prefers). Saudi Arabia and UAE can spend all of their natural resource wealth building shiny buildings, but it's still a desert. Also, no one has the amount of wealth needed to stabilize a whole country to make it politically stable and secure.

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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by raverbashing on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @11:46AM (#19502078)

To be very honest weather is the least of the concerns. Otherwise other cities wouldn't have gatherings of people.

Nobody is saying they should put all the money into turning a developing country in the USA, but maybe they can, I don't know, try other cities around the valley and not get crammed all together into one city that's naturally restricted in growth

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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by mark212 on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @11:58AM (#19502222)

Those other cities around the valley are just as NIMBY and impacted as SF is, and the problem is even worse because the local governance structure is fractured. Mountain View, Palo Alto, and Cupertino are all separate cities with their own mayors and councils and zoning restrictions

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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by raverbashing on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @02:34PM (#19504365)

California is not only the valley

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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by qaq on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @11:47AM (#19502093)

San Diego is pretty good and not that far :)

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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by mark212 on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @12:01PM (#19502263)

More than half of San Diego renters spend 30%+ of income on rent, making it one of the least affordable areas in the country.

https://www.kpbs.org/news/2019/jan/03/more-half-san-diego-co...

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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by geggam on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @11:54AM (#19502178)

and that is why San Diego rents are heating up.

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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by gusmd on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @06:27PM (#19506806)

Talk about heating up! My rent in Carmel Valley increased by 10% last month!

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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by ex_ex_nihilo on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @11:24AM (#19501801)

If you want to sell software, it's good to be situated physically next to the biggest software companies in the world. I work in the Valley (but live on the East Coast), and having your company immersed in that culture can have benefits. There is a certain perception that persists, a certain level of legitimacy you are granted just for living alongside the Big Boys. Along with the accompanying downsides, of course. The answer to why VCs stay in the Valley is because it's been working for them.

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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by gridlockd on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @11:15AM (#19501664)

Rent is just another overhead. What good is it to save 50% on investment by moving to the middle of nowhere when you can't readily hire anybody?

Sure enough, other cities are up and coming, but it takes time.

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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by chadash on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @11:54AM (#19502180)

The problem is that outside of a few tech hubs, most companies are unwilling to pay developers salaries that even come close to what they can make in a tech hub. So the best developers move to the tech hubs, where the jobs tend to be more interesting and pay better. Plenty of people would take a 25% pay cut to live in a cheaper city than SF, but the reality is that they might have to take a pay cut of 50% or more, and even when you adjust for cost of living, that sort of pay difference is still dramatic (housing might be cheaper in many cities, but car ownership, healthcare, groceries and your kids' college tuition are largely the same).

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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by selectodude on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @11:48AM (#19502100)

You don't even need to move to the middle of nowhere. Basically anywhere else would work. Even San Diego is rather substantially cheaper than the SF bay and the weather there is orders of magnitude better.

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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by mark212 on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @12:06PM (#19502334)

San Diego has the tenth highest rent in the US and while it may be cheaper in absolute terms, the average salaries are lower too.

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/real-estate/sd...

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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by selectodude on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @12:17PM (#19502480)

Sure, I'm not saying pay people the local prevailing wage. I'm saying pay people the same and let them keep way more of that money, or hire more devs, or have nicer offices, or whatever. Just stop handing it to landlords in the Bay.

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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by ghobs91 on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @11:17AM (#19501694)

Great point, something I've wondered myself. You'd think with the immense amount of money and influence tech companies and VCs wield, they'd do more to out-lobby the NIMBY homeowners and get denser housing approved.

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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by chadash on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @11:46AM (#19502071)

VCs are one piece of the equation, but so is talent. Google could care less about VC money at this point, but they have large presences in Boston and New York where there's a strong local talent pool to draw from. And there's not much talent outside of certain cities, because the best talent from other areas tend to move to these cities.

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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by gridlockd on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @11:09AM (#19501584)

> VCs are largely already wealthy, and SF is a pleasant city to live in if you're already wealthy.

Is it though? I feel SF is a rathole that is occupied by a lot of people who overpay for rent because their salary allows them to.

If you're really wealthy, you're not going to be living in the city at all.

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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by bilbo0s on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @11:47AM (#19502090)

>If you're really wealthy, you're not going to be living in the city at all...

???

Huh?

Are you talking about the same San Francisco as everyone else here?

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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by hodr on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @12:45PM (#19502819)

Probably.

The rich live in San Francisco, the wealthy live in Napa Valley / Sonoma County. Can't fit a helipad, two tennis courts, putting green, and an olympic size swimming pool downtown.

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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by bilbo0s on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @01:19PM (#19503232)

The wealthy don't live in Napa Valley, new money does. Totally different thing. Napa Valley is to San Fran what the Hamptons are to New York. IE - the place boringly nouveau riche go to emulate the rich of yesteryear.

The wealthy have their own very large islands. Islands that are very likely nature preserves. They don't need Napa Valley. I can assure you though, that the wealthy also have homes all over the world. And I guarantee you that crappy cities that smell like pee, such as London, San Fran, and Paris, are on their holdings list.

That's just the way it is, cool kids want to hang out with cool kids. And when they're not, they want their privacy.

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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by gridlockd on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @12:41PM (#19502771)

Perhaps I'm not talking about the same "city" or the same "really wealthy people".

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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by ericabiz on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @11:15AM (#19501667)

> Why don't businesses shop around for cities more?

They do. Amazon's HQ2 search was the most public of these, but other companies are expanding as well.

Apple, without much fanfare, announced a gigantic second campus in Austin, as well as locations in several other cities: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/12/apple-to-build-new-ca...

Last month, Google announced the lease of a 35-story tower in downtown Austin for up to 5,000 employees: https://www.statesman.com/news/20190131/source-google-to-occ...

Facebook announced the lease of a 17-story tower in north Austin last September: https://www.statesman.com/business/20180906/sources-facebook...

These are just Austin (since I live in Austin, I'm familiar with these stories) and just 3 big tech companies. Other tech companies are also expanding in other cities.

The cost of living has gotten so out of control in the SF Bay Area that these companies can no longer hire and retain good engineers. Also, it took more than 20 years to change this opinion, but companies are finally starting to embrace remote work and remote workers.

There's now a popular trend starting too, where founders live in the Bay Area long enough to get a demo off the ground and raise capital, then leave for greener (cheaper) pastures: https://www.axios.com/entrepreneurs-leaving-bay-area-for-nex...

Unless California can un-gridlock its housing, I expect this trend will only continue.

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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by bilbo0s on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @11:55AM (#19502196)

They go to Austin though, because they have to be in Austin. Not because they want to spend that money. Same with NYC and NoVA, you just have to be there, they don't want to make outlays to move to NYC. They'd all prefer to just stay in the Bay Area/Si Valley region if they could.

Notice, none of them are moving any important people to places like St Louis, or Omaha, or Little Rock, or wherever. Those places are much less expensive than Austin or NoVA, but the tech companies don't really have to be there.

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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by goobynight on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @12:25PM (#19502567)

This.

Silicon valley is leaking, starting with places that have huge amounts of cash and have already hired everyone they can in the Bay.

They'll start by offering a few people to transfer with same pay to a way lower cost of living city with a different/better for them lifestyle. Enough will bite and those people will then spin up the new hires.

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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by gridlockd on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @11:18AM (#19501707)

> Austin

+1

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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by robbrit on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @12:57PM (#19502970)

They are expanding outside SF. Amazon's HQ seems to have deliberately avoided SF; Google has expanded significantly in Austin, Boulder, NYC. Uber has expanded significantly in Pittsburgh.

The challenge is that remote offices are difficult to work with. Logistical difficulties like time zones and remote conferencing aside, often you get an all-you-see-is-all-there-is effect from senior management who tend to bias towards the area they are in vs. remote offices which encourages the most ambitious people to relocate back to the mother ship. This then trickles down the corporate ladder - the remote offices will have less exciting or visible projects, so employees there have lower chances at promotion, which provides an incentive for them to move too. It's not a question of companies opening remote offices, it's how they can reduce the effect of gravity that pulls employees back.

Gravity aside, the problems described in the article also exist in these other cities too. I'm living in Boulder right now and the NIMBYism is strong here too - I definitely would not be able to afford a house in the city itself.

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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by darksaints on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @12:40PM (#19502759)

This question is practically as old as time. Politicians have been trying to relocate labor and industry for centuries now. Ideas have been proposed and tried, and every place that has been successful has a hundred different competing explanations for why it was successful, and the same goes for the places that were unsuccessful. The matter is complex enough, and success rate low enough, to be able to confidently say we don't know really how to do it.

It actually is easier to reform cities than it is to relocate everybody that is made worse off by their poor decisions. And since San Francisco's poor decisions are negatively affecting every city within a 100mi radius, it would make sense for the state intervention to be the tool that brings the change.

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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by mark212 on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @11:55AM (#19502198)

It’s not just SF. This article also talks about NYC and the massive problem they’re having with the subways. San Diego (#8 in most populous cities) is having a very difficult problem with homelessness and has extremely high rents, one of the least affordable in the US.

NIMBY and high rent isn’t just an SF problem, as this article notes. It’s just easier to focus on SF because its problems are well-documented.

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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by lmm on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @11:57AM (#19502208)

Every dense city has the same problem. Short of creating a company town 2.0, as soon as the population and density are high enough to work for a knowledge employer, the same NIMBY dynamic takes over.

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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by kortilla on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @10:53AM (#19501370)

Tech jobs have little to do with SFs housing problem, tech is just a convenient scapegoat. In the 80s the blame was finance.

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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by umeshunni on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @11:04AM (#19501510)

Meanwhile, every time there's a proposal to increase density and build more housing, the local NIMBYs show up and protest.

My neighborhood association just sent us this today:

https://m.imgur.com/gallery/TvX3679

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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by rayiner on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @11:24AM (#19501797)

San Francisco sounds like such a hellscape. Apparently, most of the city is zoned with a 40-foot height limit: https://qpho.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-5843aebefa7517e39d3b4.... That's about the same as the height limit in our neighborhood in exurban Maryland.

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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by kradroy on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @11:34AM (#19501930)

The buildings might get 2 stories taller! At least they chose a reasonable time for the meeting.

I don't know what to do in SF other than trying another round of electing supervisors at large. The way the "supervisorial courtesy" works in the city turns neighborhoods into inviolable fiefdoms. I can influence my supervisor, but my district isn't going to be able to solve the various urban decay problems on its own.

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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by bduerst on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @01:06PM (#19503058)

Join the progressives fighting this FUD: https://www.sfyimby.org/

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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by gridlockd on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @11:07AM (#19501541)

> Tech jobs have little to do with SFs housing problem, tech is just a convenient scapegoat.

You say that without giving an alternative explanation. If it's not the tech jobs (and the jobs built around them) that raised demand so much, what else is it?

> In the 80s the blame was finance.

Again, why do you assume that finance was just the scapegoat, not the actual reason?

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