
San Francisco Spent a Decade Being Rich, Important, and Hating Itself - smadge
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/scottlucas/san-francisco-spent-a-decade-being-rich-important-and
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hn_throwaway_99
I'm kind of disappointed in most of the comments here, because I think most of
them are so focused on pushing back against the "tech bro" characterization
(and TBH I think pushing back against this characterization is totally fair),
that they're missing the broader picture of "Hey, things have become kind of
fucked up in our largest cities", and it's worth thinking about how to deal
with that.

What do I mean by fucked up? I mean that the cost of living and housing has
become so high that the broad cross section of people you need to produce a
vibrant city (e.g. bankers, politicians, techies, policemen, teachers,
fireman, waiters, paramedics, artists, etc.) can no longer all afford to live
there, and this is a _real_ , _serious_ problem. Cities have always had rich
areas and poor areas, but as inequality has grown over the past few decades,
with wealth flowing out of rural areas and into urban ones (especially
"supercities" like SF, NYC, Seattle, etc.), it means that these cities are
having less and less room for anyone but the rich.

SF is just the most acute example because (a) the concentrated tech boom here
has created enormous amounts of wealth and (b) the geography here more tightly
constrains sprawl compared to most other cities. However, the same exact thing
is happening in lots of other places. E.g. there used to be "good parts" and
"bad parts" (Hell's Kitchen, Alphabet City) of Manhattan, but there are almost
no cheap places in Manhattan anymore. Similarly, Austin TX was a "slacker's
paradise" 30 years ago, now pretty much all central housing is looking at
$300-400k or more just for lot value of a single family home.

I'm not sure what the answer is, but I think it's worth talking about how
something feels broken in our cities, and what viable solutions would be,
instead of just focusing on the "anti-anti-tech-bro" angle.

~~~
wbl
America has only two cities: the rest are suburban conglomerations. Actual
cities have buildings over four stories and apartment buildings everywhere.

~~~
perl4ever
Cities that I've been in, maybe precisely because they aren't "actual cities",
have high rises downtown, but mostly that area is too expensive for ordinary
people to live there. I don't understand why, given that the center of any
area is necessarily relatively small, it shouldn't be reserved for commerce,
because that is what requires everybody to come together. And it is!

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baron816
The vilification of the “tech bro” is really such a tragedy (I know, preaching
to the choir here). We’re just people, trying to make a living for ourselves,
and doing the things we enjoy. Our culture is no better than anyone else’s.
But neither is that of those lived in the Bay Area for the previous decades.
Why should we be denied the life we were meant to live because _they were here
first_ and they _don’t have room_ for us? There’s plenty of room for everyone
to coexist, if we make it.

~~~
Apocryphon
But that's the thing- there isn't plenty of room, both in terms of affordable
housing, and in actual housing (SF is 49 sq. miles hemmed in by the sea). And
as our industry gets more entrenched, we are creating that which is directly
in contravention of one of our craft's most important axioms: a monoculture.

~~~
wbl
49 square miles used improperly. We could house millions with the ancient
technology of the apartment building.

------
desert_boi
For anyone that hasn't seen it, _Cities Without Suburbs_ is a book that lays
out the case that fragmentation and infighting are a major hindrance on
American metro areas.

San Francisco is bounded on all sides from expanding, so it's partially at the
mercy of its suburbs when it comes to things like housing. Has there ever been
a movement to consolidate the Bay Area like how Nashville consolidated 14(?)
counties with the city itself?

~~~
x3n0ph3n3
Given how poorly San Francisco is run and how corrupt its politics are, I
don't think anyone outside of San Francisco would want that.

~~~
CoolGuySteve
Silicon Valley could at least consolidate. I used to live on the border of
Cupertino and Sunnyvale. The sales tax was different depending on which side
of Homestead Rd I was on.

What was the fucking point of that? Were the culture and values of Sunnyvale
really that antithetical to those of Cupertino?

It would be really nice if one of these parking lot hamlets actually did act
differently and zone themselves to be super dense but when I left councilors
were still mostly arguing about public WiFi and paying millions to water those
plants in the road dividers all summer long.

~~~
masonic

      ...on the border of Cupertino and Sunnyvale. The sales tax was different depending on which side of Homestead 
    

No, that's never been the case. Neither Sunnyvale nor Cupertino has a city
sales tax.

~~~
masonic
Um, downvoters, it's the truth. City-specific sales tax is rare in CA;
generally, parcel taxes, bonds, etc. are pursued instead.

~~~
x3n0ph3n3
He's probably confusing his cities. Santa Clara has a 0.25% city sales tax,
among other cities in the county:
[https://www.salestaxhandbook.com/california/rates/santa-
clar...](https://www.salestaxhandbook.com/california/rates/santa-clara-county)

San Mateo county also has a few cities with their own sales tax:
[https://www.salestaxhandbook.com/california/rates/san-
mateo-...](https://www.salestaxhandbook.com/california/rates/san-mateo-county)

------
majos
Somebody help me understand the appeal of the bay area. What is the relative
weight of

1\. proximity to other tech companies (good for employees switching jobs) 2\.
proximity to venture capital (good for entrepreneurs) 3\. general culture of
tech work 4\. general culture, food, weather?

4 seems to pale in comparison to the cost and quality of life issues I have
read about (super expensive, dirty, bad transport).

2 seems plausible. But are in-person meetings so necessary and hard to set up
outside the area (also, how many people there just want to be employees
somewhere and don’t care about VCs?).

3 is pretty nebulous. And again I wouldn’t expect this to be a big factor for
people who mostly just want to work somewhere and not build their own thing.

I’m left with 1. Is that it?

It just seems weird that company location appears optimized for founders (we
should go where the action and investment money and talent is!) and not the
enormous mass of people who would just be clocking into their jobs and making
those companies run. I have no data on this, but it looks like those masses of
lower-level employees might prefer to live somewhere more “sensible”.

It looks like such an...inefficiency.

~~~
corysama
It’s not just optimized for founders. The investment-employment concentration
is a feedback loop that has been running for decades. Investment stays here
because there is such an established concentration of talent. VCs talk about
wanting to tap into the global talent pool. But, remote/distributed
development is still a penalty vs everyone on the same floor. And, there are
no comparable concentrations elsewhere.

The Bay Area is expensive. But, if you have a tech job, the pay balances out
easily. Sometimes excessively.

There is tons of interesting tech work in the Bay. Not just pay the bills and
go home work. But, work that is fascinating in itself. If you can’t find
fascinating work here, maybe your interest in tech is limited to the paycheck.
That’s totally respectable. But, you’d probably be happier some place more
family friendly, or with mountains, or with a culture less focused on work
-even if your bank account won’t grow as fast.

The arts culture has fallen off recently as rents have risen and the
drug/homeless epidemic has really picked up in the past two years. But, it’s
SF is still a beautiful city full of wonderful things. And, a lot of (mostly
dog) poop.

~~~
shuckles
For what it’s worth, many of the region’s problems are not unique to it and
are instead shared by any prosperous economic region in the USA. Land use,
infrastructure, ineffective bureaucracy, urban place making, etc are
countrywide issues that need resolution, and in some ways the Bay Area is
leading that reform. I hope to see Prop 13 repealed or greatly weakened before
I die.

------
SCAQTony
San Francisco has been a boom/bust town since the gold rush. San Francisco's
economic focal point, which has lasted there for a century or so, is tourism.

Have you heard about that sinking luxury condo skyscraper in S.F.? The terrain
is formable in San Francisco, the geographic location treacherous. San
Francisco's urban plan does not work well enough to fit nearly a million
people. NYC has less than half the square mile footage, yet double the
population. NYC works primarily better mainly because of location and
geography. "...It turns out that Manhattan has a bedrock unusually suited to
the construction of very tall buildings, in many cases just a few meters below
the surface."

[https://observer.com/2012/01/uncanny-valley-the-real-
reason-...](https://observer.com/2012/01/uncanny-valley-the-real-reason-there-
are-no-skyscrapers-in-the-middle-of-manhattan/)

~~~
ericd
Thing is, it doesn't need to be skyscrapers to house vastly more people than
it does, it just needs to be 5 story walkups. And SV is currently one long
stretch of strip malls, open air parking lots, and single story ranch homes
with sad little yards.

~~~
pasttense01
5 story WALKUPS? Very few are going to walk up that many flights of stairs.

~~~
sfjailbird
Ever been to a European capital? They consist almost entirely of that type of
buildings.

~~~
desert_boi
Not even capitals, if you look at cities like Hamburg.

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pascalxus
The decision of the Mayor back in 2012 to attract a bunch of Tech companies to
the city that wanted growth the LEAST, is highly questionable. It's just such
a contradiction of what the locals wanted. And, now we're paying the price,
litteraly.

In SF, I used to think the answer was to build more housing, lots more. But,
after hearing from sooooo many NIMBYs and so much extreme angst against any
kind of growth, I've come to realize that SF doesn't deserve tech companies or
any companies for that matter. It's time to accept what the locals want and
start acting like it. Remove the incentives for companies in SF and start
applying disentives.

Tech needs a new home, a new city, perhaps one that hasn't been built yet.
Perhaps one where innovation will be welcomed instead of stifled. One, where
inclusiveness is all encompassing (and applies to housing) and not just a
catchphrase used to be politically correct. One that isn't covered in poop. A
city where enough housing supply can be built for everyone.

~~~
Gunax
The USA is such a vast country, there are so many nice areas. We don't need to
cram all of one industry into a single city.

I vote Denver, Seattle, or Pittsburgh.

~~~
boring_twenties
Denver and Seattle are both already having extreme housing shortages,
congestion, and in the case of Seattle an anti-tech backlash.

~~~
someguydave
There is a brewing backlash in Colorado against the Californians who couldn’t
make it in SV but moved here and forgot to leave their extreme left wing
politics behind.

~~~
boring_twenties
Salt Lake isn't nearly as bad as Denver yet, but it's on its way.

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seibelj
Sad the author can’t be a dictator and make the world exactly as they
determined it should be, as that sounds like their true passion, other than
injecting smug into their veins every few hours. What an awful, meaningless
article.

------
allovernow
> Hordes of newly minted and newly wealthy tech bros, flush with Silicon
> Valley VC cash, ruined what once had been an all-are-welcome cool, gray city
> of love, where the funky landlady Anna

This article nicely represents the narccisistic hubris of the ivory tower
leftist viewpoint, and in-group social behavior at large. Tech Bros are the
nerds that were (and still are, despite shallow appropriations of nerd culture
in the mainstream) cast off from "normal" society. This has been the norm in
the U.S. for decades. It's not cool to be smart and have geeky interests.

Now tech is hot and the in-group is having trouble competing with people for
whom this wasn't just a job or a class, or even a hobby, it was an escape. So
they go after their characters to justify quotas and the now deliberate social
stigma they were previously oblivious to enforcing. Tech Bros is a dirty class
stereotype which totally ignores the passion and skill of the people who are
revolutionizing society, for better or worse. And at the end of the day it's
just the weird nerd kids being bullied as always.

There's an obscure blog by a guy who talks about the three or so stages of
popular subcultures, and how one of the three groups eventualy ruin
everything, linked in the comments below which is related.

~~~
nytesky
Tech bros are not the nerds and geeks of years past, suddenly rich. That was
the dot.com boom.

These are sons of the elite who used to mainline to investment banking on Wall
Street, or maybe a MBB shop — they follow the money.

There are plenty of nerds coming here, and they make a bit more money if they
snag a FAANG job, but VCs and bros make sure they don’t get too big a slice of
the startup pie.

~~~
throwawaybbb
I've been called a tech bro, late 20 something 1m in net assets. Me and my
group of friends are absolutely the geeks of yore. Ffs my last pitch had a
wh40k reference in it and the guy financing it spend more time talking about
warhammer lore than about the actual startup.

~~~
dmix
People who only get their understanding of Silicon Valley and the wider hacker
and startup cultures from the mass media. Which mean the Ubers, WeWorks, and
Googles. They think this is the sum of tech and it totally ignores the average
day-to-day life of working in tech.

There's a million companies making millions or selling for hundreds of
millions (or even 10s) who never make the headlines. They do weird obscure
niche stuff that would take 20min to explain to an outsider.

And 99% of them are all run by normal hardworking nerds-from-high school type
people who aren't pretentious or failed to grow out of University stereotypes
of educated males, and yes males do a lot of dumb ignorant stuff in their late
teens and early adulthood.

But the average entrepreneur isn't the 20 something prodigy the news fawns
over, it's usually a 40+ guy whose been in the industry for a long time and
found niches problem sets which they can specialize in and make a lot of money
automates/dramatically improving how businesses are run in those markets.

Then there are the super nerds who work at Google and Tesla and Twitter, but
mostly they are mid-teir nerds just happy making a living being able to work
with other really-smart people. There isn't anything toxic about any of this.
It's just highly curious people working on problems that interest them. And
occasionally that involves pushing uncomfortable hard-changing solutions
society isn't quite ready for - or nerds who weren't quite ready for society.

It's a learning process and SV will get better at interacting with the wider
world. I hope too that the world starts treating SV (and the tech hubs around
the world) with more respect.

------
thatsenough
What made San Francisco what it is today?

It's not the soft-on-crime District Attorney who cleared out the prisons by
releasing criminals back onto the street.

Not the soft-on-crime SFPD, who barely enforces the law because what's the
point? The DA won't prosecute anyway.

Not the fact that the hippies grew up and moved to Marin, and marijuana and
mushrooms have been replaced with fentanyl and methamphetamine.

It's certainly not the bustling drug market that operates in 24 hours a day
without police interference in the Tenderloin around Hyde and Golden Gate,
making the city a go-to destination for drug addicts from across the region.

It's not the hundreds of millions of dollars the city hands out each year to
homelessness advocacy groups that have no accountability and deliver no
results.

It's not the entrenched NIMBYs who fight housing development tooth and nail.

It's the tech bros.

~~~
smadge
I think the article was more nuanced than that.

~~~
thatsenough
I wish it were, but it's not. The author presents a myopic and one-sided view
of the situation, scapegoating the city's numerous problems on a single group
of people. It's not nuanced at all.

~~~
smadge
No, the article literally presents two sides of the story, presents the claims
of both sides, and at the ends attempts to provide a synthesis. The two sides
presented are those that find fault with the NIMBYs who blocked building more
housing, and those that find fault with the “tech bros” who are viewed as
gentrifying communities.

~~~
smadge
“That’s one way to tell the story... But there’s another”

“And depending on which camp you found yourself in, there was one of two
essays you’d brandish at dinner parties, yell about on Twitter, and pretend to
have read that explained what the protests symbolized.

One was by the prolific writer Rebecca Solnit ...

It took until the following year for those inclined to the second point of
view to find their voice, which came under the guise of a long post at
TechCrunch by journalist Kim-Mai Cutler ... Point being: This decade has been
such that, were you inclined to agree with Cutler or with Solnit, you could
find plenty of evidence to support your point of view...

As the decade comes to a close, in many ways we’re no closer to a synthesis
than when we started. Tech’s villains continue to be awful, both individually
and collectively. And our housing production remains anemic.

And yet there are signs of hope.“

In fact the heroes of this story, if there are any, are the “tech bros,” big
tech companies, and YIMBY’s who are making attempts to build more housing and
be neighborly.

~~~
Apocryphon
Have big tech really been making enough of an effort to build more housing?
Apple's $2.5 billion pledge was made only months ago, and not specific to San
Francisco. Certainly there's an overlap between YIMBY and tech workers, but it
doesn't seem to be one to one. We aren't seeing high-profile Engineers For
Affordable Housing groups come to the forefront. Do they even exist?

~~~
smadge
I don’t agree with all of the conclusions of the article. I just think it’s
patently false that the article is one sided and vilifies technology workers.

------
_bxg1
If Jackson, Mississippi is in 1985, I worry that Austin, Texas is in 2010.
Slowly, and in miniature, the signals are starting to crop up. Homelessness
downtown has visibly increased in just the past 3 years. Historic holes-in-
the-wall are dropping like flies. Plenty of new housing is going up, but it's
all luxury apartments with ground-floor shopping. The city's culture that
everyone moved here for is being thrown out with the bath water. It's tough to
watch.

