"While you're at it, Google, stop providing the property tax base for our city, and start having your employees drive individual automobiles to work every day."
Google: consider Chicago. We'd be happy to have you. Also our food is better, we have all four seasons, and most of your employees wouldn't even need a special bus to commute, because our public transportation actually works. But you can still run your busses out to Plainfield and Elgin (the approximately equivalent commute from SF to MTV). We'll find the busses charming, not inflammatory.
I am of course dignifying what has happened here. Really, this is just a bunch of people thrilled to have an excuse to fuck up a bus.
The choice is not "tech employees live in Oakland and commute by car" vs "tech employees live in Oakland and commute by bus". Get rid of the buses, and the tech employees will move closer to work. It's a classic straw man argument.
I don't have a problem with gentrification, but I do think it's tone-deaf (at best), and maybe counter-productive (at worst) to ferry rich people into low-income neighborhoods via fancy white buses on a daily basis. Turning Oakland into a bedroom community for silicon valley does nothing for the people who have lived in Oakland for decades -- they're raising rents far more than they're building low-income housing with the taxes on their rent checks.
If the tech companies want to encourage their employees to live in Oakland, they should open offices in Oakland, pay their taxes in Oakland, and otherwise encourage people to live, work and play in Oakland. Bussing folks out of town in the morning and into town at night is the worst possible outcome for everyone but the people on the bus.
Absurd. Google MTV employees would not move out of San Francisco or away from Piedmont street in Oakland if you took the busses away. People have been commuting by car from San Francisco to Mountain View and Santa Clara since the dotcom bubble.
Meanwhile: by paying employees who own and maintain property in Oakland, Google is in fact providing part of the tax base for Oakland. Every other city in the country understands this and their mayors and city councils practically puke on their shoes trying to get big employers to move in. When big employers leave cities or go under, it devastates the economy. It does not take a degree in econ to understand why.
Income inequality is a real thing. Starving cities that are already under immense financial pressure of tax revenues does nothing to solve it.
But, like I said: opportunity to fuck up a bus. How do you pass that up?
"People have been commuting by car from San Francisco to Mountain View and Santa Clara since the dotcom bubble."
I'm sure that some people were doing that. You can find people who will tolerate anything. The point is, the buses shift the market by making that kind of commute appealing on a large scale.
"by paying employees who own and maintain property in Oakland, Google is in fact providing part of the tax base for Oakland. Every other city in the country understands this and their mayors and city councils practically puke on their shoes trying to get big employers to move in."
Red herring. Again, the increased property taxes those tech employees are paying (assuming they're not just renting from owners who are all protected from tax increases by Prop 8, but I digress...) isn't offsetting the real cost-of-living increases experienced by the people living in Oakland.
Said another way: your theoretical, twice-removed tax-base gains aren't making the housing cheaper, or the poor people richer in Oakland.
Gentrification is the reality, its just a matter of where at this point. Why is gentrification centered around where the tech companies are based better than gentrification in lower-income neighborhoods. Either way people are getting displaced and rents are going up somewhere as demand exceeds supply.
I find it interesting that in this situation in general (and in your comments in particular) most of the blame seems to be focused on the tech companies. The businesses are just making economically rational decisions around how providing transportation helps recruiting. What is their alternative?
There are two sides to the supply and demand equation. Asking companies to scale back the "demand" for workers moving into the city is ridiculous. The City of San Francisco is the one that is actually to blame for not appropriately managing the supply side of the housing market by making it so hard to get new projects approved and built. Why is all the focus on the companies and not on the city government and neighborhood NIMBYs that seems to proliferate all of SF.
Google's shuttle services are primarily chosen based on demand by Googlers (I hope!). Our lives and incomes are our own, and it's not for you, or Google, to manage our choices so as to minimize the inconvenience to others.
We live in a market economy where goods go to the highest bidder, not the person who wants or needs it most. However if you really feel for some reason that the people in Oakland being displaced are the people in the US who are most in need of help, there is a very simple solution: pay their rent for them with your own money.
It's not really a strawman to say that shuttles take cars off the road because Googlers commuted from the city to Silicon Valley by car before the shuttle program existed. In fact, it started as a 20% project in response to the annoying commute.
If the commute is annoying, move closer to work. Don't come up with a solution which is illegal.
But oh, I forget, this fits right in with Google's approach to doing business, from whether it's scanning books or slurping up wifi data: break laws first, deal with consequences later.
Are are you harping on about where the busses are parking? If so, why not direct your irritation at the city government, which could be making a few hundred extra dollars a week writing them parking tickets.
The question is whether or not stopping to pick up passengers is illegal or not. That's different from parking, which implies that the driver is not in the vehicle to move it in case of emergency (or a Muni vehicle that needs to use the stop).
'The choice is not "tech employees live in Oakland and commute by car" vs "tech employees live in Oakland and commute by bus". Get rid of the buses, and the tech employees will move closer to work. It's a classic straw man argument.'
That's not a straw man, you might have meant "false dichotomy".
I think that OP was trying to say that anecdotally people will actually not move closer to work, they will just drive. At least this is supported by some kind of data, where your premise is not.
Google and other companies are violating traffic laws repeatedly by illegally parking in a public bus stop. How could you forget to mention this important fact?
By your logic, every single person who pays local taxes should just go on a bender and do whatever they want to the city, to hell with the rules eh?
Why is it okay for corporations but not individuals to disrupt and fuck things up?
You really think this makes the situation sound better for the protesters? "They were parked illegally"? So get the city to write them a fucking parking ticket. I'm sure Oakland could use the revenue.
If getting your municipal government to act on your behalf was so simple, do you really think they would be resorting to smashing windows? You're so blind, dude.
Again, way to totally miss the point. Whether or not the smashing is justified is a much larger discussion, though largely irrelevant to establishing your repeated evasiveness. So let's say for this point's sake that it absolutely isn't justified, under any circumstances. Does my point not still stand?
Your suggestion to the window smashers was to "get the city to write them a fucking parking ticket". I asked you why you think they would be engaging in the tactics that they are engaging in if that were any sort of viable channel through which to have their grievances addressed. As far as I can tell, you've done nothing to address my question, and your suggestion to the protesters remains invalid and meaningless. I think you should retract your condemnation of them, since so far you've been unable to propose a realistic alternative.
Care to make a wager, how about just for $100, of course you'll lay me 99 to 1 odds given your certain right?
There's been several local papers that have reported they don't have permission (e.g., http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Google-riders-under-si... ) and talking to a Muni driver he indicated they don't have permission. If you're willing to take the bet though, I know one of the PR guys over at MUNI who I could get a hold of to provide us a definitive answer.
"Currently, those buses are using Muni stops without permission and without paying a cent."
I just want to edit this to say, I'm really disappointed in you. I had a lot of respect for your comments, but you don't bother to even read a reply and post a sarcastic response, just very disappointing.
And since jrockway deleted his comment where he was "99.9% sure that Google has permission", without any evidence of course, and then when presented with evidence, doesn't even read it and posts a sarcastic response to a youtube video, I'll take the time to note here, there is plenty more news out there reporting the same thing, that Google does not have permission, this doesn't mean they don't have some hidden deal hence why I still think it'd be valuable to get a MUNI spokesman to comment on the matter, but you can see in the archives of their meeting there are numerous mentions of citizens questioning if Google has permission:
Hey, I agree with you. I don't live in San Francisco. I don't live in California. I don't even live on the West Coast. I don't work for Google's transportation team. I don't work for Muni. Why am I even commenting? More speculation isn't helping anything in this already overheated thread.
I did like my sarcastic YouTube link, though. In that respect, I regret nothing :)
Thanks for your reply. As someone who does live in San Francisco, and has lived here for a decade, I would like to encourage discussion of this topic, as I think both sides of the issue can be doing more talking about solutions, rather than the tech world which is mostly ignoring the problem, and the protestors whom don't have a clear message or agenda outlined.
Sure. What is the problem for residents? In my experience, cities are basically vehicle chaos from 6AM until 11PM. Taxis unload in the bike lane. Black cars block the street waiting for their flaky passenger. UPS trucks, parked six-abreast, unload Amazon Prime packages. Traffic blocks the intersection as the light turns red, and much honking ensues. Crazy homeless guy pushes his cart of possessions the wrong way down the bike lane.
Certainly, having big buses pulling in and out of traffic doesn't help speed up the flow of traffic at that precise instant in time. But the situation was already pretty bad, and if you're taking hundreds of individual cars off the road, that's a step in the right direction.
(Public transit won't work because the jobs are all in the Middle Of Fucking Nowhere. Try walking to the Google campus some time. It's in the middle of a swamp, separated from the mainland by a jam-packed freeway.)
So I'm not sure what the solution is. Move Google to San Francisco? Sure. But then the protesters are going to complain about how they watched 5 N trains go by without stopping because they're full. San Francisco was never designed to be "the big city" (that's San Jose, right?), it organically grew. People liked it a lot, they moved there, and now there are too many people that want to live there, and not enough space for them. That's a problem, but it sounds like a problem that can only be solved by not wanting to live there.
Shifting blame on to other offenders doesn't take away from the problems created by the buses. Given an Apple bus picks up at one of my corners, and a Google bus at the other, I often encounter the buses and their employees. Sometimes, the two buses need to be in the same place at the same time, this means either us MUNI riders have to wait for the corporate bus riders to get on and get moving or that the corporate bus blocks traffic while it waits for the MUNI bus to move.
As for the Google Campus, I have taken public transit to it, it's not hard, can take either SamTrans or CalTrain + a walk. That's not to say it's a solution though.
The only real solution to the real problem (increased rent prices causing gentrification) is to increase the housing supply and reduce demand on that supply. Google has some levers it can pull to do that (build dorms, invest in real estate projects, etc.)
I think the problem lies with Northern California's chronic NIMBY-ism, which makes it impossible to build infrastructure other than roads. (Let me know when BART gets extended down the peninsula.)
The deeper issue is that people choose San Francisco because of the relatively low density, which does make for rather pleasant neighborhoods.
High-density low-income housing projects have been proven a failure in every other major city, so I'm not sure that's a solution either. Most cities have already town them down, settling on San Francisco levels of density. As an occasional visitor, I certainly find it nice. (Though taking the bus to the Richmond District from downtown is quite an ordeal. 30 minutes to go like two miles!?)
There really is no easy answer; I don't think anyone knows what to do, and I don't think NorCal has the risk appetite to try something experimental. That's the problem.
(My solution would be to make San Jose more appealing to the tech-worker demographic. It doesn't have the charming hills or coastal location that San Francisco does, but it is pretty close to a lot of jobs. I would consider living there if I moved to the Bay Area. It's even biking-distance to Google, and it's not quite the suburban wasteland that Mountain View is.)
Good comment overall, but this bit doesn't strike me as quite true. It may be that certain cuisines (Polish, Italian, American, and several others) are better in Chicago, but in United States I've yet to see a city that beats New York or greater Bay Area for variety of quality food.
Some cities have their specialities (American and seafood in Pacific Northwest, East and South-East Asian in LA), but walking down Clement Ave in SF or Shattuck Ave in Berkeley alone is quite a religious experience for a foodie (not to mention many hidden spots of great ethnic food in South Bay).
That said, Chicago is unmatched in one respect: architecture (no, not even by New York). Simply a stunning and beautiful city.
Having money or providing is does not entitle you to determine how other people live. Wealth entitles you nothing to deciding how society should be structured. You're having more market value than a janitor may give you the practical power to bully the people around you into behaving as you'd like - it's immoral for you to do so though.
Seriously? I'm kind of shocked at the raw stupidity of this comment- just a bunch of people thrilled to have an excuse to fuck up a bus huh?
These are actual real problems that need actual solutions, and the elitist attitudes really need to stop. Just because we know technology doesn't make us better than those who don't, and for the bay area to be a sustainable location it really needs all members of the community to work together. The tech companies have failed at this, and that's why these protests are happening. Not because people want to 'fuck things up'.
As far as the Chicago bit goes- yeah, it's not a bad city. I feel the bay area could learn a lot from it when it comes to scaling things up. I can live without the snow though.
I hope everyone of these protesters standing in the way of the bus gets arrested (as opposed to protestors standing aside - no problems with them). It's not elitist to want people to be civil. It's not elitist to want to go to work. There's no solution to gentrification. Not a single one. There's nothing to be done about private entities buying private property at a price that the buyer and seller agree on. The next door neighbor has no say whatsoever over the process unless there's a pre-existing homeowner's association. If you aren't happy with it, tough luck. Annoying people isn't going to help anyone. Because there's absolutely nothing that can be done, short of a constitutional amendment that would never see the light of day.
If you're going to talk about following the law, how about the fact that the bus is illegally parked in a public bus stop? That's why these guys are protesting, because the individuals in the city have one set of laws they're supposed to follow while the tech companies are apparently immune.
Seriously, read what these people are saying. They've complained about the fact that Muni buses are dumping people into the middle of the road because these tech buses are literally parking themselves in the muni bus stops to pick people up. If any other citizen did this it would be a $271 fine, but for some reason having a tech company behind you means you're above the law.
The two tiered system- the economic apartheid- is the real issue here.
> If you're going to talk about following the law, how about the fact that the bus is illegally parked in a public bus stop? That's why these guys are protesting, because the individuals in the city have one set of laws they're supposed to follow while the tech companies are apparently immune.
and from below:
> Again, that's the main point of the main protest
This is just dishonest. When the organizing groups say they're going to have another protest in january and keep protesting until the Ellis Act is repealed, it's silly in the extreme to suggest that the "main point" has anything to do with using MUNI stops without permission. And that of course has nothing to do with the protest in Oakland (where the window was smashed), but I notice you put in "the main protest" there, so I assume you're referring to the one in the Mission.
Gentrification is a very real issue and constantly being brought up in these protests. When signs read "TECHIES: Your World Is Not Welcome Here" and that fake Google employee is saying "This is a city for the right people who can afford it", no, bus parking is an outlet for ire and certainly not "the main point".
> If you're going to talk about following the law, how about the fact that the bus is illegally parked in a public bus stop?
Well that's a perfectly OK thing to protest, but I'm not sure it's illegal though. Have you called the city and asked? I bet they have permission. Illegal means violating the law, are they violating the law or you just unhappy about the arrangement. I can see a valid argument being made about it not being a good thing, but I doubt it's illegal.
If it is illegal just call the police? What do they say?
They don't have permission, and the cops haven't done anything. Again, that's the main point of the main protest. They don't have permission- again, something that's been brought up at the protests, and is on the signs themselves. Yes, they are actually violating the law.
Maybe you should like, educate yourself on the issues because picking a side? That way you can actually be informed, instead of spouting reactions that really don't make sense in the context.
In SF they have permission yet people still protest. Some shuttle stops even have signs which look like they've been installed by the city, ie "No Parking/Shuttle Stop 6am-10am" on Van Ness
Yes it's illegal. The city has turned a blind eye to the problem, but now it's gotten too big, with buses stopping everywhere.
The city says there may be a trial next year with designated bus stops being used by these private buses for cash, but until then, the law is being flouted.
If you got a car or van and started transporting people across the city using the public bus stops, sooner or later, you would be fined and probably arrested too.
So affected cities have a few choices: fine every delivery vehicle and bus which parks 'illegally or illegally uses municipal bus stops. Modify code to allow stop sharing. Disallow non municipal buses from using municipal bus stops. Allow them to use side street. Or, if they mean to disallow private buses altogether, prepare for an increase in traffic and commute times.
Interestingly, I don't recall protesters protesting the delivery vehicles who constantly block traffic lanes all over SF. That gives me pause and think the protesters' 'narrative' is questionable.
Are the same people protesting the Megabuses and Bolt buses when they 'illegally' use the same bus stops as municipal buses? Otherwise this does look like it's targeted.
I'd support the buses loading unloading on side streets, but still, imagine all the cars which would have to be on the road to replace the buses, if they were made illegal. Having buses bus people is actually a good thing.
What I think bothers some of the protesters is that the careers they chose aren't as remunerating as those chosen by 'techies'. I know artists who resent the fact the the average person does not value 'Art' as much as they value low brow entertainment. They feel at a loss and upset at the fact they have to 'sell out' doing advertising gigs to make money --that doing 'Art' is not profitable and that the government should subsidize it more because "they know it's good and it's an intangible part of a good society, etc." Much of that may be true, but the reality is most people (the proletarians and the vilified middled classes) don't have an appreciation for 'Art' and ironically it's the wealthy who 'get' 'Art'.
MUNI routes are not optimized for all people and some people work in a different municipality, etc. Academy of Art College, UCSF, etc. all have private buses and shuttles to address that shortcoming. I can almost hear the outcry that 'techies' are overcrowding our buses!
Have you seen the size of the UCSF shuttle buses? They are tiny compared to the tourist coach sized google buses. Also they don't just take UCSF staff and students, they also take patients.
Googlers can take the Caltrain to Mountainview and hop on the free shuttle buses which drop them off at their campus. Why don't they do that?
Or since Google has an office in San Francisco here's a better idea - let people who live in San Francisco work from that office, and people who live outside work at Mountainview.
So what? That doesn't give corporations the right to break traffic laws in SF, not just once or twice, but repeatedly for years. The city has failed to do it's job of enforcement, but the violator is still guilty.
Because Muni is incredibly slow--I can walk from Fort Mason to Market Street faster than I can take a bus, and that's with a foot injury that has me limping and unable to stand by the end of the walk--and doesn't go anywhere useful. Caltrain is slow and expensive, lets off a several mile hop from Google, and requires an hour or more on the aforementioned awful Muni bus to get to the starting part.
If the public transit was functional, like in DC or NYC or Boston, we'd use it.
> for some reason having a tech company behind you means you're above the law.
Which tech company is behind Academy of Art[1] and UCSF[2]? When I lived in San Francisco half a year ago, I saw far more of these than the tech company shuttles.
Academy of Art and UCSF shuttles have their own stops, usually fronting the massive amount of real estate that they own. I've never seen one idling at a muni stop.
Economic apartheid... Not sure how to digest that one. That's a tad hyperbolic.
The article clearly states that the tech companies pay the city for the right to use the bus stops. Elected officials made a decision to sell public bus stops to publicly traded corporations.
> The article clearly states that the tech companies pay the city for the right to use the bus stops. Elected officials made a decision to sell public bus stops to publicly traded corporations.
What you are saying is factually incorrect. They are not paying anything at the moment. They are in talks to start paying next year, but the reasons those talks happened is because people started protesting this.
Way to totally miss the point, though. Trampling on the ostensible-if-fictitious rule of law is outrageous, and accordingly instills outrage, which is often manifested in such ways as breaking windows of vehicles.
> If you're going to talk about following the law, how about the fact that the bus is illegally parked in a public bus stop?
A vehicle temporarily pausing to pick up or discharge passengers is not usually regarded as "parked". A car is unambiguously "parked" when it stops and the driver leaves. If the driver is still present and you want to charge him with something, it's more likely some sort of moving violation would apply. "obstructing traffic", perhaps?
To the employed elite, I can see why it would seem that way. Of course elite isn't a precisely appropriate term, but relatively speaking, it is an elitist stance.
> not elitist to want people to be civil.
Actually, yes, it is, and quite so. Try being "civil" when you're homeless or struggling to fill your stomach. Seriously, just try it.
If you always try to think in terms of the "actual real problems" you will find yourself unable to make judgments about a lot of obviously terrible ideas, so long as they are distantly related to an "actual problem".
Be careful when you oppose tptacek. He's a highly karmic figure on HN and has an army of ardent followers who can downvote you to oblivion fairly quickly :)
I don't know anyone who lives in the city. Anyone with a family lives in the burbs off the train line, with house and rent prices increasing geometrically as you approach distance to the train stops.
Most of the people who work for us in Chicago live in the city. I live in Oak Park, 5 minutes walk from the Green Line, in a house that costs 1/10th as much as the same house in MTV.
This is really ridiculous. I used to have some sympathy for their cause—through no fault of their own, they're being priced out of their neighborhood.
But the point where they start physically attacking employees is the point where they lose any respect. Employees aren't trying to get them evicted. Heck, at least they're taking shared transit instead of private limousines.
Sorry, but they've reduced themselves to common hoodlums and should be treated as such. No evictions? Evict every person who participated in a violent attack on their neighbors.
When an entire class of a city are being priced out of their homes it's a bit fickle to say a smashed window and a 100 angry protestors makes you think they deserve no respect.
"Sorry, but they've reduced themselves to common hoodlums and should be treated as such."
>When an entire class of a city are being priced out of their homes…
Presumably they are being priced out of their homes because they don't actually own the houses they live in. Is your solution to pass a law preventing the people who do own the houses from raising the rent?
They? Only one of the protest groups did anything, the other groups have just been protesting. I don't think it's reasonable for everyone to drop support for these guys because of a couple of assholes.
> They? Only one of the protest groups did anything, the other groups have just been protesting. I don't think it's reasonable for everyone to drop support for these guys because of a couple of assholes.
But the other group also condoned the actions of the hoodlums and declined to disagree with their tactics.
Since we're being 'reasonable', let's pay attention to the logic.
First, "declining to disagree" is not at all the same as agreeing. Declining to disagree with violent tactics isn't agreeing with or even condoning said violent tactics. It's simply declining to disagree.
Consider: you're either with us or you're with the terrorists. But wait, what if I'm not with either of you? What then?
This construct propagates a lot of hatred and dysfunction.
Second, remaining silent -- i.e. refraining to comment at all -- isn't implicit agreement or condoning. As far as I can tell, nobody other than whoever slashed the bus's tires condoned slashing the bus's tires.
I can't find anywhere in the posted article where the "other group" condoned any of the violent actions that occurred (e.g. slashed tire, broken window). So I don't know where you're getting that the "other group" condoned the actions of the hoodlums. Unless you're inferring from their "declining to disagree" with the tactics that the "other group" condoned the tactics". Which if that is the case, we've just shown how that logic isn't tenable.
I very specifically used the word "condone" because it's meaning generally is around failing to stop or disagree with unacceptable actions. Criminals can't, for example, condone crime—rather, they participate in it. Its police who condone it by standing by.
Likewise, leaders of a protest movement have to specifically say that violence is an unacceptable tool in their movement. (See MLK.)
The other protestors didn't remain silent. They were interviewed and given the chance to respond to the violence of the other protestors and deliberately phrased their responses so as to not condemn violence.
> Consider: you're either with us or you're with the terrorists. But wait, what if I'm not with either of you? What then?
Perhaps you're a Muslim cleric, or one of the many people who simultaneously condemn terrorism and American foreign policy.
I completely disagree that leaders of a protest movement should say that violence is an unacceptable tool in their movement. For one, there is no consensus around what constitutes "violence" -- some people consider shouting to be a form of violence, others consider property destruction, and others restrict their definition to bodily harm. Then there's the question of whether self-defense justifies violence, and the related question of what constitutes self-defense -- if you believe you're going to be forced from your home, is it self-defense to resist?
There is a real history of "divide and conquer" being used by the state to publicize and in some cases invent real and imagined differences between groups. The memory of COINTELPRO -- specifically bad-jacketing and anonymous letters -- is very strong in today's Left (and understandably so, given the success of the tactics at neutralizing groups like the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement) and trying to get half of a protest to condemn the other half should rightfully be met with suspicion.
I don't think people need to answer for things they did not engage in or intentionally facilitate. Also consider: agent provocateurs have been used in the 20th century (a matter of fact) and the 21st century (perhaps merely a matter of suspicion) -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_provocateur#United_States and combining the tactic with your concept that everyone who participates needs to answer for everyone else who participates is results in some pretty unfair bullshit really quickly. Especially for any event that's publicized in any way, you really can't control who shows up and what they do, and it's unreasonable to expect people to.
As for the actual incident, based on one of the first-person accounts it sounds like the window was broken from inside the bus. If that's the case, that actually shows that the participant greatly increased the risk to themselves in order to minimize the chance of bodily harm. If you don't draw a distinction between actions against people and actions against property (a moral position that is strange to me - surely there's a difference between smashing in windows and smashing in heads!) perhaps that doesn't matter to you, but not everyone sees the same way, nor do people need to.
If you want to talk about violence, focusing on what you've defined to be the violence of the protesters is also greatly limiting the discussion. Evictions are characterized by armed sheriffs showing up to someone's home and forcing them out. I think evictions -- which happen systemically and all the time -- are much more violent than an occasional window being broken, and I don't think I'm alone in that belief. MLK also used armed guards to protect himself and while it's easy to find quotes of him calling the US violent, I challenge you to find a quote where he condemns members of the movement who believe in violence. He viewed non-violence as strategically superior, yes, but his cooperation and coordination with groups that support self defense only increased over the years, up until his murder.
The xenophobia and lack of basic logic of these protests are appalling. Even the people giving speeches at them[1] have a hard time making the connection between the buses, the evictions, and the tech industry.
"we are against the ellis act ... we see that as related to tech and we want the ruling class which is becoming the tech class to listen to our voices"
"we are against the tech money that has caused evictions of seniors and people with disabilities throughout the community"
uh...wut?
I understand that the growth of the tech sector generates quite a bit of demand for housing and that leads to increasing rents if supply is held constant. But, this is a econ 101 problem. The solution is to let more housing be built as to stabilize the prices and not YOU PEOPLE GTFO ALONG WITH ALL THE ECONOMIC BENEFITS THAT HAVING A THRIVING INDUSTRY IN THE LOCAL ECONOMY BRING!
And this is why you don't give leftist communities economic development. They don't even appreciate it, nor do they know what to do with it. Let them live in their equally-distributed poverty.
The issue is complex, but let's look at demand vs supply. It is simply how the market works. The more people living in the city, the more likely the housing rent will increase. If there is a shortage, the rent will raise. If there are new apartments built, more polished, the rent will be higher. And there are companies pay for housing in MV which results in shortage.
The problem is the city does not do a good job securing affordable housing. It isn't like Googlers or Twitter employees don't shop. They probably shop a lot, spend a lot of cash.
These high-tech employees are also suffering with the high rent. Not everyone makes 180K a year. At least 1/3 of the salary goes to the government and 401K.
The other reason housing becomes less affordable is foreigners who come to invest in real estate.
Kick them out? Detroit is be happy to take care these tech geeks. But I bet 10 years later they will just be unhappy when the average residents can't afford an apartment.
My problem is with low-pay jobs. Security at big tech companies are hired by contractors and they get low pay. Google should be able to pay more, shouldn't they? I remember there was a series of protest this summer in MV.
Maybe Google should just build a dorm.
It is sad people can't afford a place to sleep. I can't imagine being homeless right now in NY, it's fucking cold. Can we do better? How do we do better? Should we have more affordable housing and more generous affordable housing policy?
How about drastically liberalizing zoning regs? How about taking a sledgehammer to restrictions on increased density? How about letting very tall skyscrapers be built with minimal delays and log rolling?
Never forget the SUPPLY part in supply and demand. It's a complex problem of course, but none of this is even being considered.
> very tall skyscrapers be built with minimal delays
Coming from HK, it is indeed a way to make housing more affordable in 5-10 years, until big cash invest in them and then the entry price just goes straight up.
The ways to prevent that to happen quickly are limit how many skyscrapers apartments can be built in the next decade and how many must be reserved as affordable housing, plus restricting foreign money. But I am sure there will be resistance.
As I said, coming from HK, I was used to living in a city surrounded by walls and bricks. Then NY felt a lot different. Then this summer I went to MV for an internship and when I came back NY was strange to me. I say we can't build a lot of skyscrapers. I don't want to be surrounded by walls again.
I don't think too many people prefer the concrete-and-wall environs of HK compared to the Victorian promenades of SF. However, we are all constrained by reality and scarcity. There is scarcity of space in SF. It must be alleviated by either increasing supply or suppressing/diverting demand. If supply is increased to a much larger extent, an HK scenario is possible which might decrease subsequent demand due to reduced aesthetic value. There are no perfect states here, and choices must be made. Restrictions can stay in place, however, no one should delude themselves into thinking that this isn't a cartelized capture of value by existing property owners in bed with the city council. It doesn't mean you can't support this option, but the reality must be kept in mind.
>"The people outside your Google bus serve you coffee, watch your kids, have sex with you for money, make you food, and are being driven out of their neighborhoods," the flyer read. "While you guys live fat as hogs with your free 24/7 buffet [my emphasis], everyone else is scraping the bottom of their wallets, barely existing in this expensive world that you and your chums helped create."
Wow that is a lot of vitriol, it really does feel like back in High School. Too bad for the protestors there are fascist police to protect these fat nerds, er, techies.
I don't know about prostitutes, but one of my good friends works at an upscale strip club here and her clientele does primarily consist of tech workers, especially whenever a conference rolls around.
The protesters are professional activists, the progressive's progressive. They're not impugning the morals of tech workers. They probably called their colleague in activism at the sex worker's support organisation and asked if they wanted to come to the protest.
If we were all working on farms, or whatever it is their ideal is, we would be making our own coffee, working with our kids out in the fields, and would be too tired to be having sex at all. There's a whole class of shit jobs that wouldn't even exist.
I don't think anyone should be grateful for a barista job or whatever, but it's probably better than weeding a cornfield for six cents an hour. If everyone was poorer, everyone would be poorer. Income inequality has always existed and will always exist: money comes from value, and people have to create that value somehow. If you create less value, you'll have less money. (I agree that it's difficult to bootstrap yourself from shit job to riding around in a Wifi-enabled bus, and that's something we should try and fix. But the money to fix it has to come from somewhere.)
There's a lot of irrational reactions to shuttles for some reason. I live on top of a "deluxe" cheese shop in Lower Polk, and the owner yesterday told me "Google shuttles, yeah, don't like them, they are causing all those techies to move in and drive up rents." Especially strange to hear from the owner since techies are probably the ones buying their $20-$120 bottles of vinegar
A person can be "constructive" while fundamentally disagreeing with the premise of these protestors. I would recommend the following as a starting point:
Hehe, touche, I should have at least read the summary :)
But my link is also very relevant to the discussion and covers a different issue.
EDIT: in particular, high rents don't necessarily imply that supply should be increased, sometimes it just means poor people need to move somewhere else.
Maybe Google could just look at a subway map and put an office in a less desirable area, like Oakland, where people can easily commute from SF by subway. They might get good tax breaks if they build/lease in a depressed area. Then they would need a lot fewer buses heading south. There would be an additional benefit that some Google employees would move close to the office in Oakland, thus bringing some wealth into that area, which would hopefully snowball.
I don't know the SF area, but here's a subway map.
Delicious! Social justice rhetoric comes back to bite the SV hipsters. I hope the non SJ warriors among the techies pay attention to this demonstration of how the left wing hate machine works. Savor your own denunciation as lackeys of Koch brothers (lol), evil capitalists, rich, white male priviledged running dogs, etc. Then maybe this will make them rethink their own judgments when such rhetoric is used against other industries or classes of people.
I don't think there are many social justice warriors among "techies", at least those whose title is "Engineer". Some people might go along with it because they really agree or because they fear the consequences (viz Ben Noordhuis) but most of this politics comes from outside the industry, or from the leaders/management.
Is it just me, or is this less of the tech companies' and workers' fault and more of the greedy landlords jacking up prices? Shouldn't the protesters' anger be directed at them instead?
Landlords have a right to charge as much as they can, and tech companies have a right to pay as much as they like (in fact, I encourage it).
The real problems are (1) artificial restrictions on housing supply, and (2) people not being unable to deal with the harsh realities of the market. The free market means you can use money to buy things that other people also would have wanted. In fact, there would be little point in working if we couldn't. There is no reason to feel particularly sympathetic to the people who happened to be living in an area where rents increased. If the adjustment costs are very high, I also have nothing against increased aid to the people affected. But unless a person owns something, they don't have the right to it, and so people who have been renting a long time don't have the right to keep renting indefinitely at that price.
I'm not sure if they should be angry at anyone at the moment. The market works - jobs mean more people coming in, high salaries mean high rents, people who can afford a good location will choose their place. Unless everyone in one group changes their mind, there will be an unbalanced situation (until the bubble bursts - rent goes so high that some people realise it's not reasonable to pay anymore and some big shift occurs - another campus of a big company gets built, new easier way of commuting is created, etc.)
If they really want change, they'll have to figure out a way to create an incentive for the landlords to keep the price low, or for the workers to choose their house location differently. Being angry at anyone trying to maximise their comfort in a lawful way is rarely useful or effective.
OTOH it may be not landlords but city officials not allowing enough new construction, and their NIMBY-type electorate who protest against building adequate housing (yes, tall) and working public transportation?
I'm posting the full text of a flier[1] so people can see just how nasty and threatening these protestors were (in addition to the actual violence):
In case you’re wondering why this happened, we’ll be extremely clear. The people outside your Google bus serve you coffee, watch your kids, have sex with you for money, make you food, and are being driven out of their neighborhoods. While you guys live fat as hogs with your free 24/7 buffets, everyone else is scraping the bottom of their wallets, barely existing in this expensive world that you and your chums have helped create.
You are not innocent victims. Without you, the housing prices would not be rising and we would not be facing eviction and foreclosure. You, your employers, and the housing speculators are to blame for this new crisis, so much more awful than the last one. You live your comfortable lives surrounded by poverty, homelessness, and death, seemingly oblivious to everything around you, lost in the big bucks and success. But look around, see the violence and degradation out there? This is the world that you have created, and you are clearly on the wrong side.
Predictably, you might even believe that the technologies you create serve the betterment of all humans. But in reality, the benefactors of technological development are advertisers, the wealthy, the powerful, and the NSA analysts running dragnet surveillance over email, phone calls, and social media.
If you want a Bay Area where the ultra-rich are pitted against hundreds of thousands of poor people, keep doing what you’re doing. You’ll have a nice revolution outside your door. But if you want out then you should quit your jobs, cash out, and go live a life that doesn’t completely fuck up someone else’s.
"The San Francisco group was organized by a loose coalition of housing activists, including representatives from Eviction Free SF, Our Mission No Eviction, and Just Cause."
Do these organizations seriously campaign for no evictions, or are their names just hyperbole?
Seems like, basically, exactly that. Or, put another way, you're free to own property and rent it out, but you're only allowed to make as much profit as they want you to, maybe?
"We are a direct action group, whose mission is to help stop the wave of speculator evictions that have been hitting San Francisco by holding accountable, and confronting, real estate speculators that have been displacing long time San Francisco residents for profit."
There are protest-able problems, and there are unprotest-able ones.
The real problem with SF is its density and the people preventing it from getting denser (its density is a third of Paris', e.g.). Unfortunately, there are no protest-magnets for that problem.
what about the laws in SF that prevents developers from building new places to live? - go to the alley between 17th and 18th on mission and you'll see a picture of 'danny the developer' and gentrification references - this is their attitude although it's inherently wrong - more housing would lower prices but the city (it's rabid pro government constituents) in particular has made it insanely hard to build new projects -- got a neighbor w/3 stories and you want to build a 12 story project? good luck - not going to happen
the same protestors that are big-government (these aren't anarchists - "anarchists" in america are nothing short of hand to mouth socialists) have found out they can't have their cake and eat it too - fuck them and fuck their precious little government as well
Google + Apple employees combined count is less than 1% of Bay Area population. If you include all other rich tech firms, their total employees would probably account for less than 3% of population in Bay Area. So it seems incorrect to think that these people are driving others from their neighborhoods.
My view on California real estate is a giant bubble that fuels itself by boom in tech industry but ignoring above numbers. Last time it tried to bust it got deflated only by 25% and it back up to those levels again and going up even more. If you wanted to short some market this is probably it.
Modern-day Luddites, the lot of them. Holding up or attacking buses with employees on their way to work is an easy target. Not to mention the protestors mental acrobatics to somehow blame the passengers of the bus for the rising housing prices. That's very shortsighted and flimsy justification fodder for some extreme political activists to start riots.
At no point will violence and vandalism be a valid argument in this discussion. The fact that the different spokespersons seemed to go out of their way to not condemn this act, is telling of their expectations from their members. They're willing to place themselves above the law or at least are willing to try and look the other way if their supporters commit crimes, but at the same time they want sympathy and understanding for their dire situation?
Good luck with that.
It's an economic reality that if a property attracts higher value through development (eg richer people moving in to a part of town), that its surroundings will rise in value as well. Shops and services targeting this new demographic will start to show up, catering to their (often different) needs, which have new needs of their own etc, ... This will affect everything from the pavement, the cars in the street, the small shops, the traffic lights, to the big brand supermarkets. It's usually a welcome sign that an area is improving.
Yet from the protester perspective, they see the housing prices starting to outgrow their incomes and see themselves being forced out by their landlords to make room for richer people who can afford the rent. They don't want the area to develop further, they want to keep it at a status quo to stop the housing price from rising further.
Does that make is less of a tragedy? No, leaving one's house because one can't afford it anymore is a heartbreaking decision, but it's a decision that a houseowner should make sometimes. You can't keep something just because you think you deserve to have it. We aren't living in an utopia and we must adapt to changes in our environments, whether that is getting an extra job or moving elsewhere, or trying to get more housing developed to satisfy demand and stop the prices from skyrocketing. Why not protest the government?
IMO the protesters had a cause, but this violent act has done them much more harm than good. Protesting is a right, but when your words aren't heard, you don't get to throw stones at buses and expect to get a free pass. People will judge a group by its most prominent and vocal members. Grammatical dissection of whether or not the spokespersons are in fact not condemning the act doesn't really help their case, it rather defuses their argument and makes them look juvenile and opportunistic in the process, exactly what those who want them out, want them to be.
Google: consider Chicago. We'd be happy to have you. Also our food is better, we have all four seasons, and most of your employees wouldn't even need a special bus to commute, because our public transportation actually works. But you can still run your busses out to Plainfield and Elgin (the approximately equivalent commute from SF to MTV). We'll find the busses charming, not inflammatory.
I am of course dignifying what has happened here. Really, this is just a bunch of people thrilled to have an excuse to fuck up a bus.