
How San Francisco Broke America’s Heart - mitchelldeacon9
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/how-san-francisco-broke-americas-heart/2019/05/21/ef9a0ac0-70ea-11e9-9eb4-0828f5389013_story.html
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alphagrep12345
People complain that prices are so high that none of the restaurant staff,
waiters, etc can live in the city. NY is also as costly as SF. You see
foodcarts which earn lesser than SF restaurants, right in the Financial
District. How does NY manage this? People live somewhere away and commute.
It's going to get difficult for workers, but we're definitely not in any kind
of crisis here. NY has been managing it since ages. Several other cities are.
SF too can.

~~~
eevilspock
> [service workers] live somewhere away and commute.

How is that acceptable morally? Americans believe they have a meritocracy and
look down their noses at societies like India with caste systems, but in
reality America has a caste system too, even if somewhat better.

~~~
bdcravens
Having to commute because the real estate market prices you out is the same as
a caste system?

~~~
eevilspock
Yes, because one class of people, determined predominantly by birth (race,
gender, genetic advantages at skills in short supply), get to choose where
they live, and are served by another class of people who have to live far away
and spend their already discounted time commuting, who can’t afford the very
thing they work to provide the upper castes.

Not caste advantages but earned? That’s like saying a 7 foot tall athletically
gifted person earned the wealth those innate attributes gave him in an NBA
career.

~~~
bdcravens
But isn't the caste system marked by lack of mobility, in terms of the ability
to transcend your caste?

~~~
eevilspock
That’s why I said “somewhat better“. But ask 100 black persons how much
mobility they have, and see how many say “I have completed mobility, race
doesn’t matter. White supremacy is a myth.” Or the brown people who wash your
restaurant dishes, mow yours SV lawns and clean your SV office toilets. Sure,
many are immigrants who come here because they have more opportunities than
where they came from, but that’s moving up a rung in the caste system, not
escaping it. Even the liberal essays I read advocating more immigration or
amnesty say things like “Who else will pick our fruit?”. I cringe and am
ashamed for us every time I read something like that.

Even in India in theory you have mobility, as the country has tried to address
it the same way America has tied to correct a history of racism: caste-based
discrimination is illegal, and there is affirmative action / quotas to correct
imbalances. But just as here, where 150 years after the Civil War and 50 years
after MLK we have a racially stratified society, so the problem persists in
India.

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ralusek
"This is unregulated capitalism, unbridled capitalism, capitalism run amok."

Um, what? California, and specifically San Francisco, has some of the most
regulated and restricted development on the planet. This is not unregulated
capitalism.

~~~
jseliger
Seriously. It is hard to imagine a much less capitalistic housing market than
SF without every building being owned by a government entity.

 _Who can live on $15 an hour in this city transformed by innovation?_

It's a city transformed by bad zoning policy, not "innovation:"
[https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-
housing](https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing)

~~~
wahern
In Singapore, a poster child of modern capitalism, the vast majority of
residents live in government-built apartment buildings. In many cases the
tenants _own_ their apartment and can resell at market rate after a certain
period, but the land (if not the apartment itself) is generally on a 50-year
or 99-year lease from the government.

Government regulation isn't binary. Conservatives and liberals in America are
blinded by their own prejudices, most of which are _shared_ prejudices :(

~~~
ralusek
Singapore is the poster child for benevolent/effective authoritarianism.

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i_am_nomad
And yet the Bay Area has the worst-rated road maintenance of any American
metropolitan area. I still can’t understand how that happens in a region with
the most billionaires per capita on Earth.

~~~
eevilspock
That the most upvoted comment right now, in reply to an article about
socioeconomic injustice, in a forum read by people who benefit from the status
quo, is complaining about the roads not being good enough is rather telling.

~~~
NowThenGoodBad
While I get and agree with your point, coming from the bottom of the
socioeconomic spectrum you reference I must say, our roads in the Bay Area are
seriously broken. Dangerous for motorcyclists and drivers the same.

I had moved away for a couple years and when I came back they were a mess.

Yes, we could put more money other places, but the roads would be a decent
place to put some money to have a lasting impact.

Better public transit with expanded routes would be pretty nice too. It still
blows me away that some higher city public officials make a quarter million or
more.

They're suppose to be public servants yet they forget what it's like to live
on the lower rungs.

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csense
Living in the Rust Belt, I play the world's tiniest violin for people who say
it's too expensive in San Francisco, yet are themselves transplants who chose
to live there.

If you're disgusted with the rampant inflation of SF, come to Iowa, or
Michigan, or Indiana, or Ohio. You can live like a king on wages that barely
keep you in the middle class on the West Coast.

Bring us the economic value of your startups and the well-educated workers
they draw. Give smart, ambitious local kids a reason to stay instead of moving
away forever to some coastal city. Spreading the opportunity and wealth of the
tech economy outside a handful of the biggest cities will do a lot to calm the
political anger that's led to Donald Trump.

~~~
goobynight
I'm from the Midwest and feel the same way. SF and the like are for people
looking to ladder climb. If people just want to survive, it's almost too easy
in the Midwest. Struggling in Cali is a choice.

Pack a U-Haul and go.

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eevilspock
My heart is broken.

I grew up an hour to the southeast of the Bay, and went to high school school
in Atherton and college at Berkeley (both in the 80s, long before many HN
readers were born). I used to be so proud that my home was the most
progressive place in the country. Now I am embarrassed. My old home is now
emblematic of much that is wrong with our culture.

What the Bay says (We're so liberal! We're anti-Trump!) so deeply contradicts
what it does.

~~~
planewave
Perhaps this is naive, but also as someone who grew up in the bay (south bay
specifically) it feels like after the crash of 2001, and the resurgence of
tech after that, the culture took on a markedly different tone. I guess
perhaps in the transition from silicon dominance to web dominance something
felt like it was lost in the valley.

~~~
rongenre
I think it's more that prior to 2001, investors gave web companies a free hand
to figure out how to make money. We saw how that went -- both in the giddy
highs and crash.

Afterwards, the MBAs came in and decided that ads and saas were the ways to
make money, and if you diverged they needed to understand it. Which makes
sense, and I think it's why we haven't had exactly a 2001 repeat. But it's
making tech work far less of a giddy job.

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tqi
I don't understand why it's always new residents who get blamed for high rents
/ legacy businesses getting priced out and not property owners (many of whom
are "lifelong" residents) who set the rents.

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JohnFen
I largely agree with the article. San Francisco used to be one of my favorite
places. Now, I try to avoid it when at all possible.

