
In defense of San Francisco's techies - coloneltcb
http://www.sfgate.com/technology/dotcommentary/article/In-defense-of-San-Francisco-s-techies-4616783.php?cmpid=twitter
======
tptacek
They shouldn't be angry at techies, who, after all, are helping fund the city
with their taxes.

They have good reason to be angry, at the city itself. It's comically
mismanaged. San Francisco spends more than 2x per capita than Chicago does,
and something like 3.5x what Los Angeles spends. Its outcomes across the board
are poorer.

Moreover, the city is infected with NIMBYism that prevents it from employing
the rational response to a housing crunch, which would be _building more
freaking housing_. San Francisco is small, and, more importantly, locked in
geographically. It's a metro area that can't afford irrational density
restrictions; it's a Manhattan that zones like it's Des Moines.

People have written about the mismanagement and quality of life problems in
San Francisco for a decade and a half. It shouldn't surprise anyone that
people on the streets in San Francisco are happy to look for scapegoats, since
it's a lot easier to beat up a pinata of a Google bus than it is to make new
housing happen, or get libraries and hospitals built, or ensure that quality
public transportion is universally available in all parts of the city, or
mitigate crime.

~~~
rdouble
I'm not a fan of SF's bizarre city politics and NIMBYism, but... where can
more housing be built?

Much of the western half of the city is single family homes. As are
neighborhoods like Glen Park, Bernal Heights, Potrero Hill, etc. The dense
parts of the city like the loin and nob hill are already pretty dense. In
semi-dense neighborhoods like SoMa, Hayes Valley and the Mission existing
renters have to be given the boot in order for new housing to be built. That
actually happens, and the anti gentrification crowd protests being edged out
by yuppies, because that is what is _actually happening._ I'm not sure where
the city could put more high density housing.

~~~
tptacek
You really think that if we took the time to work out the square mileage of
SOMA, The Mission, downtown, Potrero, and Bayview that the population per
square mileage of those areas would be competitive with Manhattan? Anything
close to it?

~~~
glurgh
Brooklyn's probably a better example that won't elicit the 'ZOMG I DON'T WANT
TO LIVE IN MANHATTAN' response. Twice the density of SF and no heavens-
darkening skyline.

~~~
tptacek
Somewhat, but Manhattan is the more accurate example because of its geographic
constraints.

~~~
glurgh
I think the fact the constraints happen to be geographical is kind of moot.
Brooklyn can't start assimilating the rest of Long Island any more than SF can
start building octopus's gardens in the Bay or housing in Daly City.

~~~
tptacek
It's not that Brooklyn would "assimilate" Long Island; gentrification always
displaces people no matter what the geography is. The problem with San
Francisco is that gentrification is made more painful by geographic
constraints.

Moving from SF to Daly City is a big deal.

~~~
glurgh
I guess I don't quite follow what the difference is. Moving from Williamsburg
to Jamaica (Queens) is as big a deal, if not bigger.

But we've sort of tangented off, what I meant was 'Agree with you but
Manhattan is such an outlier and so evocative that the mere mention of it kind
of Godwinizes any argument you're actually trying to make. That I agree with.'
That's all.

~~~
tptacek
Moving to an entirely different city puts you into a different school system
and often a different, disjoint public transportation system.

~~~
glurgh
Which seems like a or as much of a function of administrative, rather than
geographic boundaries so we're completing some sort of talmudic nerdgument
circle here and I still don't quite understand why Manhattan is a better or
even good example in a comparison with SF.

Thread depth 8 or so, though, call it a draw by mutual confusion?

------
ritchiea
It's tough, I've long empathized with complaints about SV taking over San
Francisco and the soaring rents. Largely because I believe SV culture is
intentionally blind to or intellectually dishonest about the fact that it is
first and foremost a business sector that generates revenue, not a community
that innovates for the betterment of humanity (and I think we should be okay
with being a business sector! it's creepy to try and avoid that obvious
truth). And the claims you occasionally hear about SV being a "true
meritocracy" are deeply concerning. Being a "true meritocracy" of people with
elite educations is a joke. I do include the self educated people in that
comment, once again, great work but a huge percentage of America and the world
grow up in places where the idea that they could learn Python and make 100k is
unfathomable. And quite frankly, do not have easy access to the educational
and cultural environments that aid in developing the soft skills that are
necessary to be a self educated success in SV. In short, there are a lot of
ways the SV is full of itself, so I empathize with people feeling they are
being shoved around by privileged elites.

That said, some of the anger at SV is starting to remind me of general
resentment of nerds, in a very high school way. My guess is both of these
things are going on and they are getting conflated and that's causing real
discussion to halt. Which is a shame because both are real problems, some SV
people are clueless elites and blanket anger towards geeks is unreasonable.
Any intelligent conversation about the culture of San Francisco should keep
those things in mind and be very careful not to conflate them.

~~~
michaelochurch
_That said, some of the anger at SV is starting to remind me of general
resentment of nerds, in a very high school way._

Actually, the real enemy of both categories (engineer "nerds" suffering
calibration scores and cliffing vs. San Fransicans being priced out by
useless, bland people) is the same for each: the executive douchebags who beat
those nerds up in high school and are now VPs of BizDev in those supposedly
engineer-centric startups.

~~~
rdouble
This isn't 1996. The douchey executives who invented the calibration scores
also have EECS degrees from Stanford.

~~~
michaelochurch
If the executives who invented calibration scores have EE/CS degrees from
Stanford, that's because they either threatened to beat nerds up, or paid
them, to get their homework done.

That's how people stupid enough to bloviate about "synergizing our disruptive
verticals" manage to get through elite colleges. I wish I were kidding, but
something like 60% of MBA students cheat.

Shit doesn't change much, and VC-istan _is_ Corporate America, not some more
enlightened successor.

~~~
rdouble
I wouldn't have guessed that Marissa Mayer ever threatened to beat nerds up,
but I guess I've never met her.

~~~
michaelochurch
Is she the one who came up with that shit? If so, I'm going to short YHOO.

------
wwwong
Having witnessed the eras of gentrification in the mission district (my family
has a small business around 20th and mission), the same people that are
complaining that 'techies are forcing them out' are the same people that
forced out the large hispanic community in the mission just 5-years earlier.

I shall not shed a tear.

~~~
walshemj
As they say "Never trust a hippie"

~~~
walshemj
Obviously the SF nimbys are in action on HN :-)

------
raldi
The solution to all these problems is housing density, especially in places
like the Mission, which have excellent public transportation.

The anger should be directed at low-rise zoning restrictions, and at the
incredible power we provide obstructionists to endlessly delay development
projects.

~~~
wavefunction
Actually the real solution is not focusing on concentrating all technological
development in the Bay Area or NYC or Boston but spreading it out across this
great wide country (and world) of ours so that everyone can take part in and
benefit from the modern economy.

~~~
raldi
Could you express that in concrete terms? For example, my suggestions would
be:

* Remove height restrictions near public transit

* Make the building permit process more similar to that of a typical American city. Specifically, reform CEQA and the SF Discretionary Review process.

~~~
snogglethorpe
These are transit related, but good transit is intimately linked to urban
structure.

* Get rid of free parking and "parking minimums" (not sure if SF has those, but many American cities do, and they're hugely destructive). When possible, get rid of on-street parking entirely in favor of non-car uses for the space.

* Stop widening roads (this mainly applies to more suburban areas). Start narrowing roads and widening sidewalks, adding separated bike lanes, etc.

* Bike infrastructure. This is not just good bike routes, but _bike parking_ (which is orders of magnitude denser than car parking, and far, far, more flexible and easy to integrate into the urban environment without damaging it) near popular destinations and transit.

* Figure out why American infrastructure planning and construction is so dysfunctional (costs way, way, too high, planning often quite poor) and fix it.

* Allow transit agencies more flexibility, e.g. let them take advantage of the synergy real-estate/retail has with transit, the way east-Asian transit operators do.

------
tommorris
"If the tag on Valencia had read "F- immigrants," or that piñata was made to
represent a transvestite"

Yeah, because entrepreneurs and technology businesses are marginalised by
society just like immigrants and trans people are.

~~~
cwp
So prejudice and hatred are OK, as long as the group you hate isn't
marginalized?

Or maybe it's a hipster thing? Marginalizing immigrants and transvestites is
_so_ 20th century. These techies are getting too big for their britches; time
to marginalize _them_.

~~~
tommorris
Let's see.

[http://www.civilrights.org/publications/hatecrimes/escalatin...](http://www.civilrights.org/publications/hatecrimes/escalating-
violence.html)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_violence_against_LG...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_violence_against_LGBT_people_in_the_United_States)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unlawfully_killed_tran...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unlawfully_killed_transgender_people)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States)

Ah, but that pales into comparison because someone scrawled "Fuck your
startup" in SF.

~~~
cwp
No, it doesn't. Obviously, actual violence is much worse than graffiti, and
antipathy towards tech workers hasn't reached that level. But the fact that
other people have it worse doesn't make it right.

Update: The root of the issue is that San Francisco has a political problem.
The city's voters and politicians can't seem to enact policy to deal with the
changes that the city is going through. The influx of tech companies into the
city recently is the most visible part of those changes, but they're not the
largest part. Rather than looking for scapegoats, San Franciscans should be
talking about how to lessen the impact of growth on their way of life.

------
Apocryphon
This article is about an intriguing subject, but ends up becoming a bland
editorial at the very end. The author brings in interesting anecdotes and a
few stats, but it doesn't explore the suggested trend- that there is growing
animosity between tech workers and non-tech workers- very much. He writes that
"a growing number of San Franciscans are fed up" but doesn't seem to pinpoint
who exactly this number is composed of. Lower-income anti-gentrifiers? Non-
STEM hipsters? The author brings up both, but without more data, this trend
seems ambiguous and undefined.

This article is about a news item that is still in development. But it'd be
nice to see in which direction (i.e., who are the most active anti-tech worker
segment) it's developing.

------
quackerhacker
This is absolutely appalling that this is going on...I've never even heard or
would fathom this in SF.

I was raised in San Francisco, right there on Mc Coppin and Market...smack
damn in downtown. I've always known SF to be the most accepting and tolerant
place I've lived in.

How could this type of prejudice go on in a city that allows nudes in parades,
diversity in sexuality, and a bunch of 12 yr olds to run around downtown on
Razor scooters at 3 in the morning.

I'm just speechless to hear this about my hometown.

~~~
rdouble
In the first dot com boom DIE YUPPIE SCUM was stencil painted on all the
sidewalks in SoMa and the Mission, so nothing new...

[http://www.salon.com/1999/10/29/yuppies/](http://www.salon.com/1999/10/29/yuppies/)

~~~
quackerhacker
That's crazy, although I was 11 when this was going on...so I'm guessing the
eyes of a child may not be a great reference here.

What I do remember in 2000 when I was there....WebTV, WebVan, Yahoo Auctions,
and having Lycos go fetch a search....that's when I was 12.

I do remember everyone had prejudice against the homeless, and I vaguely
remember talk of trying to oust them.

~~~
wavefunction
It's because yuppies/techies don't like their poor and disadvantaged in their
faces, they want them in clean well-lit community centers preferably located
in minority areas far away from their adult playgrounds.

~~~
deckar01
Or because "having the disadvantaged in their face" gives them problem to
solve. I don't think you understand the difference between getting rid of
homeless people, and trying to solve homelessness.

------
nthitz
Picture of the graffiti mentioned [http://instagram.com/p/aSl87rK-
IR/](http://instagram.com/p/aSl87rK-IR/) edit: someone registered
www.fuckyourstartup.com

------
protomyth
Read a newspaper from western North Dakota and you will get the same story.
Booms are incredibly hard on fixed or lower income residents. It might be an
interesting contrast given the towns in ND have an expansionist bent.

------
cooop
I've never been to SF, but I'd imagine that the tag's popularity lies in its
irony, not the fact that it's a hard hitting sociopolitical statement.

------
maxcan
"hipster on hipster hatred"

~~~
wavefunction
This is some hate I can get behind. Is there an online petition or something I
can sign?

------
michaelochurch
Technology is a weird space because it has some of the best individual
contributors, but also many of the worst managers on earth.

Now that the elites have caught on to technology being actually important,
they've colonized us as a people. Just as they've colonized the space in major
cities (see: San Francisco and New York) they have taken over us and our
economy, and we are now under occupation. And there is a Damaso Effect going
on when it comes to technology management.

What's the Damaso Effect? It refers to the theologically incompetent friars
often sent from Spain to the colonies, such as the Philippines. The good ones
stayed on the mainland; the inept, fired ones who were sent away to die ended
up in the colonies and became local authorities. You see a weird and unstable
dynamic in a colony relationship where the best people of some society have to
answer to the _worst_ of another. It leads to a lot of violence as those with
natural leadership talents (the best of the colonized society) refuse to
subordinate to people who are, although from a more powerful nation, in all
other ways inferior.

That's what's happening to nerds/"techies". We're being subordinated to the
worst of another kind. See, in the business/executive/finance world, the
_good_ ones who can actually sell and motivate and mentor (rather than
bumbling middle managers who can't motivate shit to stink) are off writing
billion-dollar private equity deals and flying around the world on private
jets. It's the bad ones, mostly, who get stuck managing nerds or who end up
being a mere product manager (of a product that was someone else's idea) at
32.

The reason I am writing this is because it's important point out that "we"
(the technology people) and "they" (the ones being priced out) have a common
enemy: the useless executives and colluding VCs who are _actually_ both (a)
running up house prices while (b) destroying the technology sector.

