
The Not-So-Celebratory Reaction to Snap’s I.P.O. In Its Home Town - ayanai
http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-not-so-celebratory-reaction-to-snaps-i-p-o-in-its-hometown
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slackstation
I hate the moral outrage against gentrification. It's natural to desire
something that good but, somehow immoral to express that desire.

Venice and the south side of Santa Monica used to be kinda a sketchy place to
live and had alot of crime though, it was on the beach.

Crime went down (as it did all over LA) and went from an undesirable place to
live to a desirable one. When people express that desire by actually moving
themselves and their businesses there, the people that were previously there
are outraged.

I get being mad at market rates going up in your neighbourhood; it's basically
a selfish desire to keep things as they were for yourself. Especially if it
goes so far as to move you out of your neighbourhood but, to make it moral as
if these people who naturally moving to the best place they can find for a
price they can pay are somehow trying to personally inflict evil on the people
that already live there is silly.

One might as well try to stop the tide from rising. We live in a capitalist
society. Real estate is one of the largest markets there is, literally
trillions of dollars in value. Even small changes in value can have huge
effects.

There is no simple solution. Even if Snap, Inc. did move to a suburb in the
valley somewhere, they would lose a significant, expensive chunk of their
workforce. The young, mostly childless employees of Snap, Inc. are exactly the
kind of people that love living in Venice. Everyone loves living there, how do
I know? The rental prices in Venice are astronomical. People already have
sacrificed alot to live there, they aren't going to move to the valley. They
are going to keep their friends and their short commutes and move to a company
in their neighbourhood.

~~~
danhak
Snapchat is a unique case because they've insisted on shoving their growing
workforce into a bunch of small bungalows, retail spaces and storefronts--
including Nikki's, a beloved neighborhood bar--scattered throughout Venice.
This has had a really outsized and unfortunate effect on the neighborhood that
goes well beyond the standard gripes about gentrification and rising rents.

They've taken one of the most walkable, lively communities in LA--where you
could just wander around ambling into funky shops, cafes and bars--and turned
it into their private, cordoned-off distributed campus.

One of the most vibrant neighborhoods in the city has turned dead and boring.
I lived in Venice when I first moved to LA and absolutely adored it, but
there's literally nobody left except techies and tourists. If that's the sort
of place Snapchat employees want to live then more power to them. Let them
stay by the beach as LA's center of gravity continues to shift to DTLA and the
eastside.

~~~
rconti
Move them off to an industrial park so everyone can complain about traffic and
how every lives so far from where they work, instead of having live/work
neighborhoods!

~~~
danhak
You can have live / work communities without shoehorning a $35 billion company
and its 2,000 employees into a bunch of retail storefronts originally built as
single-family dwellings in the 1920's.

There's plenty of large commercial space nearby in downtown Santa Monica,
Culver City and Plays Vista. None of those are the distant industrial parks
you allude to. Based on your comment I'm reasonably certain you have zero
familiarity with this area.

~~~
rconti
I was not attempting to speak to the area. I was speaking to the attitude that
nobody's ever happy. Good economy? Things are getting too expensive!
Labor/goods are cheap? Everyone's pissed they can't find work! Jobs? Traffic!
Unemployment? Poverty!

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Dangeranger
It seems to me that the more cohesive and interconnected a community is, the
more that community desires the status quo.

This makes for delightful places to live and work, but also provides a natural
resistance to large unexpected change.

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mmanfrin
Does it feel like there have been a bit more 'hit pieces' about Snapchat
recently? Is this typical around IPOs?

~~~
frgtpsswrdlame
I would say it's just tons of journalists trying to get a "unique" take on the
big business story this week. Some of those are going to be negative.

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pc2g4d
Amazon in Seattle is the most extreme example of a tech company dominating its
hometown that I know of. Block after block of Amazon buildings, right in the
heart of the city. I personally think it's alright, but I expect locals that
know what got pushed out are less sanguine about it.

~~~
jseliger
_Block after block of Amazon buildings, right in the heart of the city. I
personally think it 's alright, but I expect locals that know what got pushed
out are less sanguine about it._

When I was growing up, downtown Seattle was a wasteland at night and South
Lake Union worse. Amazon has a large but consolidated presence in places that
at one point contained almost no housing.

It wouldn't be hard to make Seattle's overall housing situation a LOT more
affordable: [http://crosscut.com/2015/09/the-burden-of-building-low-
incom...](http://crosscut.com/2015/09/the-burden-of-building-low-income-
housing/), but most wealthy existing owners don't want that to happen. Hell,
even legalizing three-story townhouses: [http://crosscut.com/2015/04/bring-
back-the-townhouse-can-mil...](http://crosscut.com/2015/04/bring-back-the-
townhouse-can-millennials-and-boomers-change-the-regions-housing-mix/) would
do a lot.

~~~
__derek__
Agreed. Reading this story, Snap struck me as the anti-Amazon. Whereas Snap
moved into an established neighborhood and took over, Amazon focused
development on a neighborhood that was derelict and turned it into a ripe area
for other developers (e.g., Paul Allen's Vulcan).

> Amazon has a large but consolidated presence in places that at one point
> contained almost no housing.

Exactly, and SLU now has a lot of new housing, mostly filled with Amazon
employees.

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jmathai
Spike Lee spoke pretty well about how gentrification marginalizes people.

[https://soundcloud.com/daily-intelligencer/spike-lee-on-
gent...](https://soundcloud.com/daily-intelligencer/spike-lee-on-
gentrification)

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wnevets
Is the tech company story line in Netflix's Flaked[0] about Snap? I had no
idea.

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4973548/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4973548/)

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hkmurakami
Echoes of Palantir and downtown Palo Alto.

~~~
Apocryphon
Palantir does seem to becoming the dominant player there, but hasn't Palo Alto
been gentrified already for decades?

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GTSblend
They closed Nikkis. Fuck em

