I live in Atlanta where the minority population is much higher all around and I don't get the sense at all that there's rampant racism or discrimination.
Is this problem unique to the Bay Area or is this largely white guilt?
But to you question, diversity in tech has little to do with the ethnic makeup of the Bay Area. This is a transient town...people come here to work from all over and it's a completely separate issue.
Back in the mid-20th century, the Fillmore was a thriving black community, with around 50k black residents in a relatively central part of the city.
The city, however, considered it "blighted." Too many homeless people, too much drug use, too much property and violent crime.
And so the SF Redevelopment Agency decided to knock down a bunch of blighted Victorians, relocate the black population, and replace the Victorians with modern apartment buildings.
That was the beginning of the end of African American SF. Obviously some relocated to other areas of the city, but just as many left for other pastures.
Housing policies since then have hardly helped the situation, but YIMBY types need to understand the history of redevelopment both so they don't make the same mistakes and so they have empathy for when poor folks in a community are skeptical of their promised land.
While true, this elides over a pretty large issue with minorities in tech. In general, the "transient after college" phase, where high potential students move to high potential areas is a privileged position that most people aren't able to participate in for many reasons. Maybe its because your parents (or brothers/sisters/nieces/nephews etc) are struggling and you need to take care of them day today, maybe its because you already have student loans up to the hilt and feel that living at home is a less risky proposition than moving across the country to a place where rent is going to be 2x the size of any paycheck you've ever received, maybe its because you feel the community you come from needs you more than you need a tesla. In general, the types of people who have these types of issues that drive them not to migrate are going to be high performing, but lower wealth, and thus on balance more likely to be non-white all else being equal. IMO, a great way to help make "tech" a more diverse industry would be to open offices in Atlanta, a city with a large black population, and a very good university.
She said that you find just as many racists everywhere, but she “appreciates” the (urban) Southern racists ones more because they don’t try to hide, so she knows where she stands.
Some of the best racism I received was in your face “sand n-word” type — it was easier to digest and joke about after the fact.
I've heard this exact statement in a Dave Chappelle standup bit. I've always taken it to mean that bigots in some areas are simply familiar enough with the area's politics, history and justice system to feel comfortable saying openly bigoted things without fear of repercussion.
I will say that the majority of racists I've actually met have been middle- to upper-class. I've always thought this was kinda weird.
I'm not an expert either, just sharing my experiences.
This the most unexceptional, unoriginal wrong talking point that always comes up in these conversations. I've heard it my entire life growing up in the south, and it constantly betrays the OP's actual experiences when dealing with this matter.
It's a southern apology. And a really dumb one at that, fueled by a bitter "us vs. them" mentality ripe everywhere in the south.
There is absolutely no data point supporting this position. Not one. People who live in cities and metro areas are consistently significantly less racist than people who grow up in homogeneous communities, especially compounded if that community is a rural one. What fits both of those criteria? Generally the south.
There's likely data to back this up: https://www.theroot.com/forbes-10-cities-where-african-ameri...
I already said I was no expert, and described my own experiences.
My own view is that everyone is prejudiced. But people are different. Some are prejudiced and loud mouthed. Some are prejudiced and liars. Some are prejudiced and just quiet. But everyone is prejudiced, so does it matter if one is more loud than the other?
I mean, if you go into a room full of pregnant high school girls, sure, some are loud mouthed. Some are liars. Some are quiet.
But there are no virgins in the room.
The difference is what you do with it. If you treat someone poorly because of your prejudice about their skin color instead of giving them a fair chance, then you're racist.
But I questioned if the feeling that "everywhere is equally racist" is valid, or if the south is actually still more racist, but all the loud racists make it harder to spot the quiet ones, compared to an area that's filled with quiet racists instead.
It doesn't matter if they say the racist thought out loud and then act on it, or they just act on it. Both things are racist. Magicians use misdirection to hide what they're really doing, and I'm suggesting that quiet racists in the south hide their activities by letting the loud racists take all the attention.
That said, I've lived in the south all my life and heard plenty of racism of many different kinds. I lived in Cali for 1.5 yrs and didn't hear much at all, and because I'm white I didn't experience much, either.
The only incident that I recall was being told that I walked through a neighborhood that was very dangerous to white people. I didn't feel threatened, and I don't even think I saw any people there. But I was told later that I should never walk there again, for my own safety. To this day, I don't actually know if that neighborhood really was dangerous to white people, or if the white person I was talking to was just being prejudiced.
However, I did notice that while people talked nicely and smiled, people weren't actually being any friendlier than back where I was raised. They were just hiding things better.
I see a lot of people who sort of cultivate a barrier of ignorance because their bread is buttered by the system. They do their job but, only semi-consciously just won’t peer behind the result of their actions.
So I will meditate a little on your position. Maybe I’ve got the wrong bias here.
Isn't that statement prejudiced and discriminatory toward people living in the South? You're doing exactly what it is you're accusing and entire geographic region of doing.
Why do you think there are more racists in the South? Why do racists believe what they do? I suspect the answer is the same to both those questions.
Mississippi is 40% African American. Of course there are racists down there as there are any where else, but you have any idea how hard it would be to function in Mississippi with that demographic make up if people were half as racist as the South is alleged to be? You'd think they'd be uncovering clandestine mass graves of black people every other week or worse down here s2g. I cannot and will not get over the blackest part of America being labeled "Trump Country" and used as the scapegoat for all of the nation's bigotry. It's fucking lazy victim-blaming. We are the poorest, least educated, and most vulnerable part of the country. Shitty rich people with shitty agendas own our governments, as they have for decades and decades, and the rest of the country sure does get off on telling us our hardships are our own fault.
1. Large Asian population. The SF companies I've worked at often had 30-45% Asian workforce. In theory this should be a good thing as far as diversity goes (and I have had the privilege of learning from and getting to know people coming from very different societies on a personal level, most of them Asian). But for a variety of reasons I'm not going to dig into, Asians don't count as "diverse" anymore.
2. Overwhelmingly left leaning workforce means that the prevailing liberal attitudes are amplified and go largely unquestioned. This sometimes even manifests itself as the organized exclusion of those that don't harbor the same politics: https://www.fastcompany.com/3067152/lessons-in-techs-past-di...
3. Perhaps as a result of #2, many in the SF Bay area aren't exploring non-discriminatory explanations as to why there are few African Americans in Bay area tech companies. First off, the Black population is not very big in the Bay area. Less than 2% of mountain view's population is black. Overall the Bay area is 6.7% black, about half that of the country as a whole. Couple this with lower rates of educational attainment beyond high school (which is usually necessary for software development roles) and it's not hard to see how a lower black population in Bay area tech roles can happen even absent discrimination in hiring. But saying these things to my coworkers would probably adversely affect my career, so the prevailing narrative of discrimination in hiring is left unchallenged.
This results in some interesting behavior. Tech roles with lower barrier to entry like help desk support are now nearly entirely black, Hispanic, or female. We recently recategorized physical security as a "tech" role (ostensibly because physical security is an important part of infosec) and now easily 70%+ of our physical security staff is black. This has sort of backfired in a sense, the few black developers I know report being consistently mistaken for security or help desk personnel.
What percent of SF Bay area tech workers grew up in the Bay area? If it is not high, it is not clear that the Bay area's general population racial demographics are relevant.
1) I don’t know what “aggressive political rhetoric” is, but it comes off as being dismissive of political opinions you disagree with
2) SF the city is a small part of the SF Bay Area. There are lots of black folks living near SF
3) Be very careful making projections about racism from your experience of Atlanta. Atlanta is the catch basin for successful black business for a large fraction of the south. I was born in Atlanta, and was really surprised when people would describe the south as racist, because my experience of race in Atlanta was so positive. But you don’t have to get very far out of the city to experience poorly concealed racism.
3. I use Atlanta because that's where I live today. I've lived in Texas, Hawaii, Korea, Maryland, Wisconsin, Ohio, Alabama, and Georgia.
I am really interested in this. Could you provide some links, please?
https://www.epi.org/publication/the-color-of-law-a-forgotten...
Long story short:
Richmond grew during WWII because it was a large ship building yard for the pacific fleet. Lots of white and black people moved to Richmond from the South and East during this time. After the war, the ship building stopped, and the workers needed to get new jobs. There was a large auto plant that opened up in Milpitas (near San Jose), that hired a lot of the workers, both black and white. There were a lot of "whites only" suburbs built near the Milpitas plant and a lot of the white ship workers moved there, bought houses, had short commutes to work, and built wealth through housing appreciation. As white folks left the Richmond community and black folks remained, the lack of political power held by black folks at the time (Jim Crow laws, discrimination, etc) lead to disinvestment in the richmond community (poorer schools, roads didn't get repaired, leading to lower property values etc). The disinvestment and community decline made it more difficult for the black community to move away, because they didn't have any housing wealth compared to neighboring communities (and many communities at the time were "white only"). Additionally, the black workers commuting to Milpitas to work spent 2.5 hrs/day commuting, while the white workers spent like 15 minutes, so thats 2 hours and 15 minutes every day for 25 years that white fathers could spend at home teaching their kids to read/focusing on their education, improving their house, building social connections/capital etc that the black fathers didn't have. That impact on the next generation compounds over time and makes a material impact on the potential of the next generation.
"Many communities were white only" is a crock; in fact, Milpitas in the 1970s had higher black propensity than did Fremont to the north or NE San Jose to the south. Both Milpitas and Ayer High schools had more black students than Piedmont Hills to the south. The foothills tended to be pricey and almost exclusively white and Jewish, but that was economic rather than code segregation.
By the 1970s, production at the plant spiraled downward, shifts were cut, abd there were always more workers than hours.
There were also redlining practices and things like razing and redeveloping the predominantly black Fillmore making it a neighborhood the previous residents could no longer afford.
When you say "minority population," are you referring to white people or some other minority group in Atlanta, or are you referring to black people, who constitute the majority ethnic group in Atlanta?
???
Uh, you don't notice any racial bickering in Atlanta?
Not saying it's only in Atlanta. It's everywhere, all over the nation really. I'm just wondering where in Atlanta you live that racial bickering is absent in public discourse?
In the context of this argument, I think it's worth distinguishing between private and public actions. People have the right to be racist, governments don't.
What does this even mean?
Also, people need to stop accusing others of virtue signalling, because they're just virtue signalling about being above virtue signalling.
I feel like people are forgetting how bad things use to be.
[Edited for tappos]
Not to mention, the trash, used needles, and human feces now covering the city.
Yes, the Mission has gentrified and mid-market is a bit cleaner. But now there are widespread homeless camps, and open defecation and needles (formerly isolated to certain neighborhoods) are everywhere. And it’s not as if the Mission crime has gone away - it’s just further south now.
Property crime is up; even in SOMA, broken car windows were an occasional thing. Now it’s every day. Twin Peaks overlook is a robbery hotspot, and some guy was shot and killed for a camera up there not too long ago.
If you only ever visit the gentrified tech zones of SF, you’d be excused for thinking things have improved, but there’s no way to argue about it objectively.
I don't think it's inevitable though, so the question is - how do we stop it? We have some of the brighter minds in tech on this forum, what are your thoughts?
The question with many cities is the same - is it worth saving? A lot of any city's downfall is often the fault of its older residents. Why do the poor stay? Why do the rich not focus on changing it? Why do communities fail to fix it together?
The obvious answer seems to be moving to somewhere nearby that's cheaper and roomier. But people seem very resistant to this for some reason.
Postwar sprawl is grossly underpopulated which makes SF seem like Kowloon by comparison, but it’s still lower density than a standard European capital.
Because that requires money.
How to stop it and create a city where anyone can live:
- build world class public transit
- double the number of houses but decommodify the housing market as much as possible with lots of social housing and controlled rent increases
>The price of a commodity good is typically determined as a function of its market as a whole: well-established physical commodities have actively traded spot and derivative markets. The wide availability of commodities typically leads to smaller profit margins and diminishes the importance of factors (such as brand name) other than price. [0]
If anything, housing is not enough of a commodity. Each site effectively has a bespoke regulatory framework that has to be discovered as expensively as possible, through a series of planning meetings. Each project requires an extremely high-touch political consensus process. Each building is expected to be unique-but-not-too-unique for its context, of-the-present-moment without altering historical character. As a practical matter, it's really expensive and take a long time and many iterations to arrive at a design that everyone agrees meets those criteria. Watch an SF Planning meeting video sometime. Most of the multifamily projects discussed on any given day are continuations. The curation process yields a great-looking museum, but we pay for the delay and uncertainty it creates in the price of admission.
Houses should be less like houses and more like soybeans: cheap, abundant, with many highly competitive producers and a price that floats just barely above the cost of production. Producers should be responding quickly and effectively to changes in demand, just as in the commodities markets. Commodities are the things we're most likely to have enough of for everyone!
Housing has effectively one producer, the San Francisco planning commission, and if it doesn't feel like meeting demand this year, everyone else has to just live with that. (There is no reason to think it would feel like meeting demand for social housing. Shadows, traffic impacts, neighborhood character changes, etc. are the same either way). Commodification would be an incredible improvement!
I'm not too sanguine about the possibility of either of those things happening in the United States. Public transit has always kind of gone nowhere in this nation outside of the great coastal cities and Chicago. And as for the housing proposal, I can already hear the howls of "SOCIALISM!!!" that will be raised by certain very powerful interests and political parties.
I'd say if "building a city where anyone can live" is the highest goal, that's an issue in and of itself.
Would you want to work for a company "where anyone could work?"
What do you have in mind? The stanford elites get to live in san francisco, and the less-elite get shipped elsewhere?
Most of us actually exert very little influence in local politics, precisely because we're here for the work. I'm in a tiny minority that's decided to "settle down" and not retreat "back home" once I've got a quarter million in investments and another 100k in cash.
And in fact, I think very few of my peers are super into local politics. Even I'm guilty of being somewhat disengaged until recently, and I'm trying to make up for that now in Daly City.
The property owners moving in sync are what dominate a lot of features in this town, and very few "hackers from this site" are actually in that club. Even the rare post-exit folks like me. The truth is that they have a lot more to gain by keeping the status quo than itinerant tech workers have to lose by just leaving rather than dealing with the difficult problem of entrenched NIMBYism.
I'm dealing with that now in my area and it is AGONIZING to sit there listening to some old man or woman go on about how Asians and Brazilians ruining the community and stealing their parking when they're the ones renting out 3 homes in the first place.
It's true though, if more of us went to local government sessions, we could probably just utterly dominate the discourse and reject a lot of NIMBYisms outright, and that'd probably result in a lot of political changes.
I myself regret bitterly how much I let my parent's culture influence my opinions on this, and it's only as I get older that I fully appreciate the many toxic and counter-productive ways my fundamental christian socialization has influenced me even as I've struggled to move more left throughout the course of my life.
The first time I ever saw a ticker-tape parade after the Yankees won the world series in 2000, I assumed NYC would be covered in paper for months. Everything was completely covered in paper! By the next morning you couldn't tell anything happened. Not a single scrap of paper anywhere on the streets or sidewalks.
Same thing after the annual West Indian Parade. After the parade, the streets of Canarsie are absolutely taken over by people partying, dancing, drinking, the floats pass back through the neighborhood, and it's just complete chaos. Next day: like nothing happened.
They have garbage cans on every corner, and most are managed regularly enough. My wife is from Queens and she constantly complains about how hard it is to find a public garbage can in Chicago. I never realized it before, but she'd absolutely right.
Also their snow is handled far more efficiently - even if you don't have an alderman or police chief on your block.
NYC is definitely dirtier than Chicago, but it's pretty damned clean, considering how many people there are in such a small space.
We cannot stop other cities from doing this to us. So we are going to have to stop whining and cope.
Sad to hear it's declined so much.
(In the mean time, Amsterdam seems to have improved a lot.)
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-re...
https://www.sfgate.com/mommyfiles/article/Many-families-leav...
I am raising my kids here and disagree with your assessment. There is a pretty good community of families here.
[0] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/sanfranciscocit...
13% of 800,000 is about 100,000. Very few.
My point isn't about in comparison to other cities, it is more, does a smaller rate really mean "few" and how much of a problem is it really. It's not the problem that the most negative naysayers will claim. Note I didn't say something like "affordability poses no problems for families". Because it does. But there is indeed a vibrant community.
I don't think there are other major cities where the population is < 14% children. NYC is around 24%.
Your view of the "pretty good community" is irrelevant. Compared to other cities, San Francisco has "very few kids/families."
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/philmatier/article/San-F...
Trash everywhere downtown, human feces/needles/smell of urine all over downtown & SOMA, depressing mix of aggressive and zombie-like homeless, very few kids/families, very few minorities (especially African-Americans), barely functioning public transportation system, high rents forcing six-figure earners to live with 2 roommates and still pay $2500/month, 400 sq ft studios going for $700k, every other non-tech worker is an Uber driver/Instacart Shopper/DoorDash delivery person