West Oakland is a traditionally black neighborhood that surrounds the Port of Oakland. It has been heavily gentrified, developed, and restructured over the past three decades. Now there is an upper class enclave that has been established near the West Oakland BART station, in Jack London, and in the city of Emeryville.
Oh fuck you and your dreadlocks.
There are only two photos on that page, so I don't definitively know who these protesters were (although there are no "traditional" blacks in those photos) -- but I know (I have a strong suspicion, I don't factually know) that the protesters were not drawn from the group mentioned above. These are Burning Man hippies, self-styled artists, people who graduated from great schools with useless majors, and the usual constituent of the Bay Area's overprivileged poverty tourists: 20-30 y/o white kids from middle class families.
The actual, working, poor people in West Oakland were at their first of the two or three jobs they hold. Or they were spending a few rare moments resting, or with their kids. Or they were lining up to get a meal at community kitchen. Actual black people were not part of this protest, because a mob of black people attacking a bus would be getting wall-to-wall coverage on every channel. It would have been responded to with a swift and overwhelming police presence.
The same thing happened a few years ago when these same non-workers shut down the Port of Oakland in the name of workers. The people who actually work the port asked that they not disrupt the port, but in the end these dreadlocked, shiftless complainers cost those longshoremen a day in wages -- Viva El Proletariado!
What we have today is a group of young, electively poor white kids who are upset that the price of unheated lofts and dingy Victorians are being driven up by people who have the means and motivation to actually own and improve them. That they wrap themselves up in the image of the poor (and yes, mostly black) -- whom they themselves displaced by rushing in to bid up rents with mom and dad's money -- makes this appeal all the more ludicrous. At least the tech gentrifiers will actually improve the fucking place, unlike these leeches!
Since almost everything else you said is anecdotal, it's hard for me to respond to, but your statement about the longshoremen, that's certainly wrong.
In general, the people that you are deriding and caricaturing represent the first wave of gentrification, and those people actually do make meaningful contributions to the areas they move into. Think of the excellent restaurants, concert venues, boutiques, bars, etc. that exist in Oakland now--that's first wave gentrification. Those people are also historically more aware of their surroundings and the culture that they are moving into and tend to show solidarity with the lower income residents that they are paving the way towards displacement for. On the other hand, the second wave of gentrifiers tends to dramatically increase the cost of living, rate of displacement, and tends to care very little about the plight of their fellow citizens.
The Google buses are a convenient symbol for economic disparity though, and I often wonder why Google doesn't try to do a real public works project instead of simply creating a segregated system of buses. Why not add wi-fi to public buses? Why not extend the light rail system into the valley? Why not donate a whole lot of money to a public mental health project so there aren't so many deranged lunatics screaming on public transit? If they did that, then they will have created a more comfortable environment not only for their own employees, but for the entire community.
...but your statement about the longshoremen, that's certainly wrong.
No, it's right. ILWU (the union) leadership has made statements such as
"Organization from outside groups attempting to co-opt our struggle in order to advance a broader agenda is quite another and one that is destructive to our democratic process and jeopardizes our over two year struggle in Longview." [1]
So I may not have been right about them speaking out specifically against the Oakland shut down, but in general the union leadership is against strikes. Although, of course, they take great pains to not alienate potential ideological allies while rejecting calls to shut down ports.
The sentiment is at least mixed, as you can see from other coverage: [2]
"Leaders of the ILWU, which represents thousands of longshoremen, spoke out in recent weeks against the coordinated effort by Occupy protesters to blockade ports from Anchorage to San Diego"
"This is joke. What are they protesting?" Christian Vega, 32, who sat in his truck carrying a load of recycled paper from Pittsburg said Monday morning. He said the delay was costing him $600.
"It only hurts me and the other drivers. We have jobs and families to support and feed. Most of them don't," Vega said.
The Longview comment is from the Longview, Washington Union rep, not Oakland. The driver interviewed there is also not a longshoreman, and very likely not repped by a union at all. The Occupy Oakland movement was not a monolithic group of dreadlocked, burning man, trustafarians as you implied, but it's a convenient mis-characterization, as is your implication that the Union was only interested in avoiding alienating their ideological allies out of convenience rather than in actual solidarity with their cause.
EDIT:
I was mistaken regarding the comment coming from the Longview rep, it's actually from the Union President. When viewed in full, his opinion seems to be more nuanced than simply "closing the port is bad."
I don't think you're effectively rebutting my larger point, which is that these protesters represent themselves as being of one population, when they are in fact of another. Certainly, if I change my statement to "some port workers" were economically damaged by the protest, purportedly on their behalf, in which they did not participate or call for, the point remains. Regarding the "convenient mis-characterization" -- my girlfriend worked in a major union for five years, specifically in the communications department; I know very well how to read statements made by, and on behalf of, union leaders. The kind of tension and political tiptoeing I described certainly exists.
The mere fact that we can point to two statements, one expressing support for Occupy, and one denouncing a specific Occupy action, by definition means that there is a conflict in strategy and tactics.
Now, I will grant that this is all based on my opinion and observation -- none of it is empirical or measured. So what? Supply some measurements if you think that my opinion is illegitimate. Tell me what percentage of Occupiers are actually from traditionally poor background -- those who suffer systemic disenfranchisement, a lack of role models, have insufficient access to education -- you know, the people who they claim to represent. If this is such a diverse movement of the working poor, go ahead and let me know how the demographics of self-identified Occupiers compares to that of East Oakland (the poorest neighborhood in Oakland.) Shit, speaking of diversity: I would be surprised to learn if even a single percentage of them were multilingual!
I'm all for advocating on behalf of those who have been systematically locked out of opportunity, who have never been able to access the things we all take for granted, which have made it possible for us to be so successful. The people I see at Occupy events are poor, but it doesn't seem to me that it's for a for lack of access. They are bitching, basically, because the opportunities for very well privileged slackers to get by decently without putting in too much effort have all dried up. The rest of us -- poor and working rich -- are busting our asses off.
Happy to be proven wrong, but these are my observations, and yes my biases too.
If your larger point is that they are representing themselves as being of one population (poor minorities), I would offer this counterargument:
Let's assume that they are all shiftless, white, dreadlocked, trustafarians. They are not representing themselves as being OF that population of poor minorities but rather are advocating FOR the population of underrepresented, poor minorities. How then are they different than wealthy benefactors donating to AIDS relief or anti-malarial programs in Africa? Well, they are donating their time, not their money, but if they do have so much money one wonders why they wouldn't simply donate that... You also make the observation that the individuals that are actually being negatively effected by gentrification in West Oakland are off working on their second or third jobs at that hour of the day, then wouldn't they need someone that is in a more comfortable position to advocate on their behalf?
It's interesting that you ask me for some empirical, measured data on the ethnic and class background of Occupiers. Because of the nature of that movement, it's nearly impossible to pin them down on anything. I was an observer at many Occupy events elsewhere, however, and what I found was very deep suspicion of anyone not directly involved in planning, so I'm afraid that it would be basically impossible to conduct the kind of research you're talking about. I was not involved with Occupy Oakland, but I know a few people who were, and interestingly enough, they had some of the same problems with other activists that you have. I do not think you are entirely wrong there. Certainly, some of the people that got involved just wanted to smoke weed, make idiotic signs, chant slogans and get laid, but it's ludicrous to suggest that the majority of activists involved there were of that ilk. It would also be ludicrous to suggest that there weren't any pseudo-activists. They were certainly there.
Personally, I found the Occupy movement's organizational non-structure to be self-defeating and it's no surprise that it has almost completely fizzled out. I also find the tactics being used by these particular protesters to be somewhat wrong-headed. In your original post though, you showed absolute disgust for these people and and in my own experience, they don't all deserve it. It will be interesting to find out more about what actually happened at this protest.
The port shutdown was about the truckers, though there was some ILWU support - I have personally met ILWU leaders who were in support.
The truckers are not allowed to unionize, are employed as "independent contractors", sometimes have to sit with their engines running, idle, trying to get into the port for hours without being able to pee. They are treated as if they operate a small business while they are in actuality an employee with none of the rights of a typical employee.
The ILWU also doesn't oppose the city or state government interfering with a port shutdown because without the ability to shut down a port, they would not exist.
"Organization from outside groups attempting to co-opt our struggle in order to advance a broader agenda is quite another and one that is destructive to our democratic process and jeopardizes our over two year struggle in Longview." [1]
Which is why I call the IndyMedia LARPing crowd "independent volunteer agents of Cointelpro."
> "Think of the excellent restaurants, concert venues, boutiques, bars, etc. that exist in Oakland now--that's first wave gentrification. Those people are also historically more aware of their surroundings and the culture that they are moving into and tend to show solidarity with the lower income residents that they are paving the way towards displacement for. On the other hand, the second wave of gentrifiers tends to dramatically increase the cost of living, rate of displacement, and tends to care very little about the plight of their fellow citizens."
First wave? Only if you define "first wave" to coincide with the current discussion. There was a wave of bio-tech (e.g Genentech) shortly before the "tech" (e.g Google) wave.
This goes back all the way to the founding of California, the state. The '49ers were the first wave. Since then there has been a sadly repeating history of picking on a group to blame for any ill in society - usually racist - but it appears this time around it's a soft target.
So the claim here is that wave zero, original inhabitants don't have "excellent restaurants, concert venues, botiques, bars etc.", and their displacement by the first wave is excusable by this fact, and some hand-waving about "solidarity."
On the other hand, the second-wave and later are callous Scrooges who just take what they can get, and thus deserve to be vilified.
This is special pleading at its most naked. I've heard the saying that you pull up the drawbridge just after you enter the castle, but you seem to want to scrape out a privileged little Goldilocks zone on both sides, where first-wavers are each an embodiment of a noble Jake Sully, fighting to save the Na'vi against the invading hordes.
First, a few places in the neighborhood are rehabbed by developers.
Next the "...Burning Man hippies, self-styled artists, people who graduated from great schools with useless majors, and the usual constituent of the ... overprivileged..." move in to the rehabbed areas and the (usually) blacks have to move out.
These hippy - artist types make the neighborhood more attractive to people even further up the food chain. (Read techies). And soon the time comes for the hippy - artists to move out.
The hippy - artists are unhappy... but the reality is... this is no more than what they did to the blacks.
Soon the time will come for the techies to move out... and, I'm sure, they will be unhappy as well when their time comes.
This same progression happens all over. I think Harlem is probably one of the best examples. (It's WAY ahead of SF area in that regard). Blacks had to move when the artists showed up because they could no longer afford it. Then, when the techies and yuppies showed up... the hippies, artists and teachers hit the roof, because it was their turn to move. Harlem is at the stage now where the celebrities and bankers are showing up ... and like clockwork ... the techies are hitting the roof because it's their turn to move.
The thing is ... in the end ... they all moved. They didn't engage in violence.
That people are upset should be expected... but I would point out that places like Harlem have gone through this process with multiple populations without violence. It can be done.
I was just trying to put the arc in Bay Area terms for illustration purposes. There ARE a lot of tech workers in Harlem, but not a "tech community". As a general rule... most of the people purchasing in Harlem are purchasing to get AWAY from their professional communities. So what I meant was more the NY equivalent of upper-middle class technocrat. ie - hospital administrators, lawyers, book store owners, doctors, sports management guys... and, of course, techies too.
Maybe it would have been more clear if I had used the normal real estate divisions of "workforce", "upscale" and "exclusive". I just thought artists, teachers, techies and celebrities would illustrate the differences a little better for the purposes of making the point against violence.
I operate out of Houston... so I only know the buildings that I have the investment info on. Without going to check... two projects spring to mind along [W] 118th (8th/Fredrick Douglas area). They are SUPPOSED to be upscale. Maybe upscale in NY is different than upscale in Houston??? Don't know.
At any rate... these are just two of several projects throughout Harlem. If you live in an area of Harlem that developers have not encroached on... buy more property around you and sit on it. You are right in the middle of what will be a golden opportunity. (But the prices may already be reflecting that. Wouldn't hurt to check though would be my advice.)
I wouldn't know... I suspect not... probably just the people that don't leave those buildings combine units. And then, of course, there are the foreigners who just buy apartments and never live in them. It's just a couple of guesses, but I think that's probably how that space is reallocated in those areas.
I seriously doubt the displaced techies and hospital administrators can afford to go buy in those areas. I think it's off to Brooklyn (or maybe queens???) with them... at least until the bankers show up there.
These are Burning Man hippies, self-styled artists, people who graduated from great schools with useless majors, and the usual constituent of the Bay Area's overprivileged poverty tourists: 20-30 y/o white kids from middle class families.
Oh, get off it, man.
All that we "know" about the perpetrators at this point is that they were apparently (1) young and (2) non-black. As to the rest the attributes you impute to them -- as of yet we don't "know" any of these to be fact. At best all you can honestly say at this point would be:
Now I don't know for a fact, but ya know, I have a hunch these are Burning Man hippies, self-styled artists, etc etc ...
This is not nit-picking. The fact that you're saying that you "know" everything about their demographic / psychographic makeup when in fact you are merely speculating is what's part of the broader problem here: rather than elucidating the problem, you're subverting the discourse.
And more to the point: you're pushing people's buttons, by appealing to stereotypes and their own identity- and privilege-based insecurities.
a) I have no objection to this phrase and will edit my comment thus.
b) I'm reacting to the race card being employed by people who are tokenizing and mascotifying (to coin phrase) the same people who they themselves pushed out!
I'd just prefer that we stick to the main point -- that the "anarchists"' actions were basically thuggish and coercive in nature, that is to say, anything but "anarchistic." Anything else (e.g. speculation as to their education or class background) is a distraction from what should be the key takeaway here.
But overall, fair enough, and thanks for the clarifying edit.
"These are Burning Man hippies, self-styled artists, people who graduated from great schools with useless majors, and the usual constituent of the Bay Area's overprivileged poverty tourists: 20-30 y/o white kids from middle class families."
That describes a huge fraction of today's protestors and activists, which is why despite many things in the world sucking I rarely take today's "activism" very seriously. It's mostly activism-as-entertainment for trustafarians.
> That describes a huge fraction of today's protestors and activists, which is why despite many things in the world sucking I rarely take today's "activism" very seriously. It's mostly activism-as-entertainment for trustafarians.
The irony is that your comment only emphasizes the severe disconnect between relatively wealthy & employable 'techies' versus the rest of the struggling recession-hit population.
It's hard to understand how life has changed since 2007 when, coming from a tech-related field, one generally doesn't suffer the everyday hardships that most Americans endure [1].
You're right that techies haven't experienced the great recession... or at least have avoided the worst of it. But the group I am referring to -- overprivileged over-educated trust fund kids engaging in faux-outrage as a form of entertainment -- are also isolated from the realities you mention... perhaps even more so, since techies have to actually work.
What these people are doing is basically LARPing. IndyMedia is their big LARPing portal site where they pretend to be radicals. Fuck these people.
As a techie, I'm not sure most of them 'thought about the future and picked a tough but useful major'. More like, most of them (including myself) picked the most interesting major, and tada, it's worth money!
> art, history, women studies and other (financially) useless stuff
The average salary expectation for someone who does calligraphy for four years is much lower than a CS major. On the other hand, I can name several large companies in the area that succeeded by not dismissing the humanities as useless.
Nor does everyone need to be. Taking a walk through any city in the United States, one will observe millions of people leading healthy, productive lives doing work in a variety of fields, both blue and white collar.
Sure, I have no problem with people doing art or studying history or women or philosophy.
My problem is with the entitlement and the attacks on the people who chose financially more successful professions.
Don't get me wrong, I LOVE LOVE LOVE art. I just don't think our society has so many gifted artists. I've taken many art classes in college and most art students sucked, truly sucked at art. There were objectively great artists among them, but I'd say fewer than 10%.
But, how is it that we recognize "many things in the world sucking" and criticize today's activism as lacking; yet have not done more ourselves to reduce the world's suckage?
I used to live somewhere where I constantly saw these sorts of "activists" protesting: GMO foods, "chemtrails" (which probably don't exist), all kinds of trendy things to protest.
I never once saw them protesting for higher wages for the underprivileged, health care, or anything else that actually matters to poor people.
They were for the most part not poor. They were white middle class pseudo-artists engaged in an entertainment activity. I love the phrase "poverty tourism."
Well, I don't know that I would say chemtrails don't exist. I think there's pretty compelling evidence that they do apart from contrails (have no idea what they are or whether they matter though). I am also a proponent of labeling food so that people have the information to decide for themselves what they ingest.
I realize that you were just giving examples, and I'm not doubting that these poverty tourists exist. I am just saying that we (and many others) agree that there are enough things in the world that suck, including the state of the issues that you mentioned, like healthcare for the poor. So, my question is: if we find the current crop of activists to be lacking, then why aren't we doing better or more ourselves? Where is the "true" activism?
Reminds me of the response to Occupy. Everyone stood back and criticized their lack of organization, cleanliness, etc. Yet, nearly everyone agreed that things sucked (including banksters, bailouts, etc.). How is it that an entire potential movement was derailed by such trivial matters as where these guys were pooping? How did the collective energy of so many end up redirected away from "better" activism and into criticism of the activists?
The only plausible theory I've read on why chemtrails might exist is that they're tests of some kind of anti-global-warming geo-engineering tech that involves spraying of nano particles to increase the Earth's albedo.
So they either don't exist or don't really matter to anyone.
My point is that these and some of the other examples I gave are clueless bullshit LARPing issues of the faux-left and are not relevant to actual disadvantaged people, poor people, or minorities. The faux-left does these groups harm by stealing the spotlight and bogarting the discussion, drowning out any actual protest from people who are really struggling with issues that matter to them.
>The only plausible theory I've read on why chemtrails might exist...
OK, not to take this to a discussion about chemtrails, but I'm not sure I'd be so cavalier about claiming that they don't matter, any more than I would be about saying that they do. BTW, if the U.S. government is involved in such a somewhat massive, radical, and obviously covert anti-global warming campaign, then that's a story in itself.
>My point is that these and some of the other examples I gave are clueless bullshit LARPing issues...
I absolutely understand where you're coming from with that. Not saying I agree completely, but I hear your point.
So, moving beyond that, my question/point is the corollary: where is the "true activism"? If, as you say, the faux-left does disadvantaged groups real harm by bogarting the discussion, etc., then where are the "real" activists?
The question is not just an indictment of those of us who see the problems but sit on the sidelines; it's a question about a society that seems almost exclusively able to generate only such sensationalized, vapid activism as you describe. This, even when we can describe the problems and their importance. Why do you think that is?
The simple reason: I think most of the people with real grievances are too busy trying to make ends meet. Meanwhile people with financially underwritten agendas and/or trustafarian types who don't have to work have plenty of time to dominate the conversation.
But there are deeper issues too. At one time those so-called "trustafarian" types did campaign for workers' rights, higher wages, etc. Now they mostly campaign for trendy eco issues and other ideological issues that have little relationship to reality and no relationship to the plight of the poor. I don't know if that's intentionally constructed or a product of some sort of breakdown in social communication, but that seems to be the way it is.
The cynic in me says this: in reality these people hate the poor. The poor are dirty, uneducated, and worst of all often harbor conservative/religious social values. Moreover empowering the poor and raising their standard of living is in conflict with environmental goals of reducing resource consumption. Who wants to use more energy and land and what-not just to take care of a bunch of rednecks and brown people? That's why activism today is basically a LARP where overprivileged mostly-white children of baby boomers try to re-live their parents' glory days and where trustafarians with dreads try to show off their street cred to get laid with cute hippie chicks. That's why they pick trendy issues that don't help or in a few cases might actually hurt the poor (e.g. limiting new construction).
I think there's a bit of truth in the cynical view unfortunately.
What's the solution? For starters, I really think people should ignore "activists" that have no skin in the game. Ask yourself if they really know what they're talking about. Are they actually affected by the issue? If not, they may well be thrusting themselves into an issue for reasons that have more to do with fashion statements and scenesterism than genuine concern or well-informed efforts to improve anything.
Take GMO foods for example, an issue I've repeatedly used as an example of a trendy LARP-protestor hobby horse. I do take protestors of GMO foods seriously when they're farmers that have been wrongfully sued for patent infringement by biotech companies, and I group that under the whole problem of patent law abuse and patent trolling that also affects the software industry. So there are people who protest GMO foods that ought to be taken seriously. But the yuppie larvae who are convinced they're going to kill us all because some quack web site says so? Fuck them. They're just clogging our informational arteries with irrelevant fear-mongering bullshit and detracting from the real issue at hand.
So let's say we do that. Ignore the LARPers, but listen to the victims of IP law abuse. That leads us somewhere the LARPers never do, namely somewhere productive and empowering, since it means that those farmers can and should make common cause with those who campaign against software patents. Now we have something that has real political meaning, a real coalition to actually get something meaningful done that can help real people.
Silicon Valley technology, this is Manhattan finance with a word of advice. We know the roots of the problem are housing supply restrictions and a lack of mass transit. In essence, City Hall problems. So why are they able to pin the blame on you?
Because you're painting a target on your back. Ducking your heads makes you a low-risk scapegoat. Scoffing at the less fortunate, regardless of whether they "deserve" it, makes you a juicy red political filet.
I'm not saying you need to up volunteering incentives for technology workers or visibly join hands with your foes and fight City Hall for more housing including, yes, the affordable kind. But don't throw daggers when you're down. As it stands, you're right but you're down.
In Houston I, and several others who live behind the gates on Sunset, have taken to volunteering A LOT of time in Third Ward for this very reason. You're a lot tougher target when your head is raised and you have a track record of advocating for the REAL underprivileged. Because chances are, the people denigrating you would never dare go to a place like Third Ward. (Which is a shame... because the people there are quite nice actually.)
Can't agree more - I volunteer at an after school programme in Harlem. It connected me with a driven, intelligent 2nd grader who couldn't concentrate because three square meals a day were beyond his family's budget. That pisses one off enough to find real solutions, not duck for political cover.
Montrose resident here. I don't have anyone denigrating me, but I wouldn't mind helping out folks in the Third Ward. Do you volunteer with any particular group or charity?
And a super-easy place to start, techies, is making sure that the janitorial/cafeteria/security staff you've contracted to work with are paid at least reasonably. "Living wage" can be hard to compute in the overheated Bay economy, but at least don't be screwing them with 35-hour-per-week jobs with no benefits. This is something that your own company can influence.
Volunteering and spending time with the actual poor in the communities where we live. Make it known on the street that techies are people who are involved with the poor, so that it becomes more difficult to co-opt their struggles the way these "anarchist" types do.
I've gotten into some 'debates' with friends on facebook who are are in the 'anarchist/burner/hipster' persuasion. And It's mostly scape-goating programmers for rents going up. But I do think the Startup community in particular could do a better job interacting with the communities we live in. Especially as more and more people jump on the startup bandwagon and don't really understand the hacker/nerd ethos of protecting the little guy that most of us embrace. The recent remarks of the founder of Anglehack come to mind as something that gives the community a very bad name http://valleywag.gawker.com/happy-holidays-startup-ceo-compl...
I think the rent issue is definitely real, but isn't the fault of techies. It's the fault of several interacting factors:
(1) Anti-development mentality on the part of city councils, zoning boards, etc.
(2) Geographic containment of the area.
(3) Shitty public transit and overcrowded roads.
(4) Foreign investors driving up the price of RE.
... in roughly that order.
#1 is largely the fault of this same stereotypical bunch of braindead trustafarian hippies, since they tend to oppose building pretty much anything because it destroys the Earth, man. In so doing they play their role in the gentrification cycle, constraining supply to drive up rents and drive out the genuinely underprivileged.
I agree with everything you've said there. The skyrocketing rents are a product of inflated tech salaries (which will deflate eventually) and greedy landlords that can ask for whatever they want and find people to pay it for the time being.
I would much rather see these protesters target the real source of the housing crisis in the bay area rather than the much more convenient target that large tech companies represent. Although I do think Google's Eloy buses are pretty repugnant and they would be viewed more favorably if they contributed something to public transit. So why don't these protesters start showing up to city council meetings, or at property management companies, etc.? Target the landlords and the politicians. It's obviously not in the tech companies' best interests to have to pay their workers inflated wages just because the greedy landlords keep jacking up rent prices.
It's likely that they do show up to city hall meetings and zoning boards... to block construction of new properties in order to save the Earth and stick it to capitalism or whatever.
Yes, it's sort of a de-facto alliance: conservative property owners and clueless braindead slacktivists. Remove the slactivists and their flimsy environmental arguments from the equation and the purely greed-driven NIMBYism of the property owners will become much harder to defend/justify.
Living on the street where this took place (albeit over 50 blocks away), this is definitely not the case in Oakland. New housing generally replaces really poorly constructed old housing that has fallen into dilapidation.
"Improving" the houses in a neighborhood almost always increases the value of other houses in the area.
Whether this creates a class disadvantage through displacement or a reduction of affordable housing is another issue, but blaming conservative property owners is not an accurate motivation. The transfer taxes[1] on housing turnover supplied a great portion of Oakland's revenue during the bubble. Given that Oakland has a weak retail (and therefore, sales tax) market, it really needs real estate to pick up.
So... we need to organize a working class resistence against the... pretend working class resistance?
Not even joking. If the imposter protestors make it acceptable for "civilized" folk to have a reactionary attitude against equality concerns, they will become a (perhaps unwitting) tool of oppression of the poor, who do have valid (if unvoiced) concerns.
Like I said elsewhere I used to live in a "trendy" place that had a huge contingent of these obnoxious faux-radicals. They would organize this silly clownish protests of GMO foods, "chemtrails," free this, liberate that, whatever, and they'd march around looking like clowns in front of all kinds of trendy businesses catering to hippie-tourists and retired old white people.
These businesses in turn paid their workers shit wages with no benefits. How do I know? Because I was good friends with a number of these workers, who never had anything to do with the IndyMedia traustafarian clown show.
I never saw a single one of these outrage-er-tainment fuckups protests unfair wages or lack of benefits. They only protested trendy issues of no relevance to the actually underprivileged.
It's a good point. These protesters, far from helping the 'locals', are giving them a worse reputation. Among it's other problems, Oakland is now "the city that smashes buses", even if the people who did it really have nothing to do with Oakland. The residents of Oakland have every right to be angry with these protesters.
but they're not angry. In fact... it's a pretty good bet that the average "traditional" resident of that area is not even aware of the fight. The original poster was right, the "traditional" residents in Oakland are just struggling to make ends meet. They're not going to look up from their grind because some upper-middle class kids want to fight each other.
Those who are aware... probably think about it in the same light as the Samuel L Jackson character "Zeus" in the Die Hard movie... "THAT'S A WHITE MAN!!! WITH WHITE PROBLEMS!!!" And just like "Zeus", that's how they will perceive it, since they feel it doesn't affect them. (And they are probably right... they won't get anything out of that fight anyway. I mean, we say they will get a worse reputation... but the reality is... the law abiding "traditional" residents don't care about reputation... you can't pay rent with it.)
People with enough of their parents money don't move to West Oakland. People who can't afford anything else and aren't afraid of getting robbed once a year do. Typically, yes, there's a bunch of kids from the "middle class", but most the ones I know are also "working poor" because they work in some sort of service industry.
Other parts of Oakland, sure. Not the core part of West Oakland though.
But you are also right, this wasn't West Oakland, or even lower class vs. Google. This was "activism class" vs Google. Which tends to describe hippies and burners.
Source: I've spent inordinate amounts of time near Willow Park.
Your disdain for people who attend Burning Man, have so-called 'useless degrees,' and are self-styled-artists does nothing but discredit you as a reasonable person. Plenty of people who fall into any combination or all of those groups are productive and capable, many of them in the technology/tech startup sectors (and don't have a problem with Google's buses.)
He's nopt expressing venom for people who/are those things, but for those who use such status to justify the sort of violent nihilism on display in this article. I know lots of Burning Man/weirdo artist types who work hard, care about their neighbors, and manage to express their political views without slinging bricks through windows or justifying intimidation by calling it 'direct action.'
If he wasn't implicitly being derogatory about those traits (and I think he was) he's certainly not describing them as positive. The other responses echo the attitude that the problem results from these sorts with 'useless degrees.'
Well, it would be easy enough to shoehorn me into that group (I never actually got around to attending Burning Man, but I have a lot of roots in the 90s SF rave scene, for example), and to me he's critiquing the sort of people who treat their membership of certain affiliate group(s) as a justification for self-indulgent behavior that comes at others' expense.
I don't see any point in making this into a long spiraling subthread that only the two of us will read, so let me stop here by asking you to consider some other interpretations of the original comment besides the worst one. It might have been worded a bit better but as a fellow resident of Oakland I share the writer's frustration with the local 'revolutionaries.'
a) "useless" should be "economically useless" -- I myself majored in Political Science and it taught me a lot of valuable things, but it would be hard to earn a living on them.
b) Nothing's inherently wrong with Burners or their culture. Those traits listed are singled out because they (to me) uniquely identify a group which floats by on privilege while simultaneously claiming to be deep in the struggle of poverty. Almost by definition, anyone who can skip work for a week in summer and spend $300 on a BM ticket (plus associated costs) is not impoverished. To the extent that they are poor, I submit to you that they elect it, and thus to claim that they are victims of the same forces which keep the working poor down is ludicrous.
I am actually fairly liberal on these issues. What I resent here is the employment of race and class language to dress up what this really is: one group of overprivileged slackers angry that they now are on the receiving end of a gentrification wave, when they rode in on exactly such a wave!
The complete denial of their own privileged status, the pretension that they are in solidarity with the actual poor and disadvantaged (who are largely peaceful and hard-working) -- that's what gets to me. Nothing specific against Burners or the humanities.
>These are Burning Man hippies, self-styled artists, people who graduated from great schools with useless majors
This is such a stupid position to take. First of all, do you realize that those "Burning Man Hippies" are, uh, literally the people who started google? Do you realize that google has made enormous donations to those "burning man hippies"?
And yes, "uesless degrees". History, art, literature, these are all "useless" of course, the only valid degrees are either hard science and hard engineering, I'm sure?
What aspects of life do you enjoy, man? A good design aesthetic? Cause that's art...
Or, perhaps good food? That's also art.
Maybe a good book, wait...
Architecture?
Beauty? Something? Possibly something that poets and artists have given you a context for, or study?
--
This is such a stupid lazy attitude to take. Come out of your hole sometime and you'll find a whole world out here full of things that you can enjoy. Just try to steer clear of those pesky "artists" who got useless degrees.
--
The people who are crying about google's buses are idiots. Don't group them together with artists or "burning man hippies".
Eh, you know what? I think you've gone way out of your way to construe my comments as meaning something different than what they do. Do you think that it was your local bookstore owner and restauranteer throwing bricks in the window? Do you even think it was someone so dedicated to their art that they've appeared in galleries and have become known for their craft? Maybe there was some brilliant author in the crowd?
Somehow, I doubt it.
As for "useless" degrees -- I majored in Political Science so I know what a useless degree is. The point is not to denigrate them for having an economically useless degree. The point is to expose what I think is the real motivation here, that slackers have found it increasingly difficult to float without having any real contribution to make back. It used to be that you could graduate with a soft humanities degree, rent a shitty loft in a neighborhood like West Oakland and still live pretty well. Now, you're gonna have to move out to the suburbs unless you can contribute, generate and capture substantial, financial value.
Certainly engineering is not the only field worth a damn. My comment was an allusion to a strategy employed by a certain class of privileged people, which is essentially to find a local minimum of effort/reward even though they typically come from a background which affords much greater opportunity. I contend that it's the demands of these people on display today, being presented as if it were aligned with the needs of Oakland's truly poor.
In short, the people protesting today are poor for different reasons than the people whose struggle they are claiming in the passage I quoted.
Are they making anything else with it? I mean, except for smashing windows and annoying a bunch of sleepy coders? I'm ok with "not everything is money" but what they have to show in non-money part? Usually their "anti-capitalism" is just another way of saying "I'd work as little as the society allows me without going hungry and do stupid shit like breaking windows and defacing other's property when I'm too bored".
My experience is that people who actually can do stuff with their life (degree or not) don't go around smashing windows. They are too busy doing their thing to spend time on breaking other's things.
Apple made a lot of money by not thinking this way, and other big companies in SV have started to notice. Skilled industrial/UX designers often come out of a humanities or art major. In fact, so do developers, product managers, and marketing staff.
Blame the protesters for throwing bricks into a bus window, but don't blame their majors.
I don't think this is a case of Apple employees smashing up Google buses. Maybe their peers from college who got the same degrees went off to find productive jobs, but I am struggling to believe that these particular people did.
If you cannot leverage your degree, then your degree is worthless (at least in your hands).
You've misinterpreted me. I am in no way suggesting that Apple employees are smashing a Google bus. I'm just trying to clear up two big assumptions people in this thread are making.
1. Humanities degrees aren't monetarily worthless. They're quite valuable (measured in dollars) to people who are passionate about the user experience, because they help those people land and hold onto design jobs. I mentioned Apple because it has historically been really supportive of the liberal arts, but it's certainly not the only one.
2. The claim that the vandals have humanities or art degrees was (as far as I can tell) invented by HN because they think these guys (https://www.indybay.org/uploads/2013/12/20/800_gbus.jpg) look like hipsters. There's no evidence to support it.
Local blogs are reporting the story: http://sfist.com/2013/12/20/angry_protesters_smash_google_bu... and it seems to back your theory. I dont think I see a single person of minority in the protest. Also the local sites are doing a better job at reporting the story then this bias site.
I wouldn't call it hipsters or nerds. The nerd angle has little to do with it actually, in another city it would be financial workers, or lawyers, or local university students.
The problem is that a big corporation like Google gives less than it takes as of now, tax wise, and guarantees their employees a standard of living out of reach for most americans now, or the rest of the world for that matter.
A standard of living paid for, in part, by the very same taxes they manage to avoid, along with several other big corporations.
Not to mention they are no stranger to the US government, and probably might have helped the very development of those formerly secret and hated programs, also with direct knowledge transfer
http://cryptome.org/2013/08/assange-google-nsa.htm
Don't tech employees pay the same income and sales taxes as anybody else? Every age has its booming industry, technology is our generation's. You can either accept reality and try to acquire relevant skills that are in demand, or act hurt and expect to get handed what others have to work for.
Actually, they pay more taxes than the average resident. Higher-income people have higher income tax rates, buy more stuff (hence more sales tax) and live in more expensive real estate (higher property tax). If not for high-income people, the cities they live in would not be able to offer the services they do to low-income people.
Google is an American company in an area that desperately needs the tax revenue. Even the money they "earn in the US" is washed through subsidiaries overseas.
The people of Google however, pay their fair share of taxes, and don't deserve to have their mode of transportation attacked.
The couple billion in taxes Google is managing to dodge is not what enables them to pay their employees so well.
Google earned $10.7b in profit last year. Go ahead and take the 20% they 'dodged' in taxes. How exactly does that alter what they can pay their employees (you know, only making $8.x billion)? I'd love to see an explanation for that.
I don't think people deserve to be displaced from their homes in massive numbers.
I don't think today's action will magically end the displacement, but I think people should have some compassion and show several orders of magnitude more concern for groups like the elderly on fixed income and the working poor facing Ellis Act evictions than for a group of techies who will be OK even after a disrupted commute. The issues being raised here are important, and I think it's more important to identify real solutions to the problems rather than focus on evading blame.
This is not to say it's either/or but I do want a world where the concerns about displacement and mass evictions are prioritized and addressed far more concern and resources than the kinds of 0th and 1st world problems that googlers (as a group - many of us have real world problems as well, of course) have.
I completely agree with you, but the action was violent, or at least scary to the people on the bus. Plenty of marginalized people have managed to assert their dignity without intentionally scaring people. My main point, however, was simply that the tax bracket of these passengers has no bearing on whether the protest was acceptable.
So... attacking the individual workers in this corporation sends the right message... how?
If you want to attack Google over Google's practices, be my guest. But attacking commuters on a bus? What the hell? Heck, the bus doesn't even seem like it was owned by Google.
It is one thing to protest unethical Corporate Practices, unfair tax rules that they're abusing, etc. etc. But its another thing entirely to attack the innocent workers on a bus.
Despite what they say, they are not upset at the corporation. The corporation is faceless and their reaction is very emotional driven with little rational thought. Hell, most of these 'professional protesters' probably have Android or Apple phones.
They actually hate the people. Why? Because they think that they are different and this is a form of entertainment for them.
It seems like you're correct in this case. Or at the very least there is no evidence for their implication that the protesters were black Oakland residents.
That said, let's not allow laziness on the part of the reporter who filed this story, and elective poor dreadlocked white kids to distract us from the real problem that is class disparity in the west. The elite live under different rules than the rest and the middle class is dwindling. That's way more important than bad reporting, which is just a footnote.
> These are Burning Man hippies, self-styled artists, people who graduated from great schools with useless majors, and the usual constituent of the Bay Area's overprivileged poverty tourists: 20-30 y/o white kids from middle class families.
A very similar situation is happening in Vancouver. In the older part of town, just past Gastown, Vancouver's original neighbourhood, lies the Downtown East Side. The DTES is 'Canada's poorest postal code', and is home to a large population of Vancouver's homeless. In true Canadian fashion, it's generally a safe and vibrant area, both despite and because of the homeless population living there (compared to the suburbs, where bored teenagers assault the elderly for something to do).
Recently, a few businesses have been cropping up; one of them, Save on Meats, opened a butcher shop and a diner; more accurately, re-opened, as Save on Meats was a cornerstone of the neighbourhood for decades before the previous owners closed it. The current owner bought the building, renovated it (or, more accurately, refurbished and restored it), began hiring the homeless and poor of the neighbourhood, and began a series of social programs aimed at benefitting the area. Their sandwich counter, a street-facing breakfast sandwich dispensary, introduced 'sandwich tokens', which can be bought from them in quantity and traded in by anyone for a warm meal. It's a convenient way to give someone something that you know will be traded in for food, without having to go out of your way to purchase it. Everyone loves it, and even the police who patrol the DTES will give out tokens to people in the neighbourhood.
Another restaurant opened lately, called Pidgin, across from a location called Pigeon Park, a common area of congregation for the DTES's residents, homeless or otherwise. On occasions, it's blocked off and turned into a giant street market, where individuals sell whatever items they've managed to scrounge up, trade, for, buy, or sell. Pidgin is a nice restaurant, it's the upper end of midrange, a place you could certainly go to in jeans and a button-down, but you might fit in better in a suit and tie.
Then came the protesters. The protesters came, spurred on by a feeling that Pidgin was making fun of the homeless people across the street, like a slap in the face. Ignoring the fact that Pidgin also hires people from the neighbourhood, the protesters congregated outside of the restaurant every day, shouting and harassing the restaurant, the staff, and the patrons. All this despite the fact that the people who actually live in the area disagree with them; both the homeless and jobless poor and the more well-to-do people who live, work, and own businesses in the area.
The other facet that the protesters seem to ignore is that part of the problem with the homeless population in Vancouver is a problem of perception; many people, especially those from the suburbs, see the DTES as full of dirty violent criminals, where you'll get knifed for your sneakers before you know it, Canada's Detroit. The reality is that these are just normal people in awful circumstances, making the best of what they have. The more people who see that, and who see how wrong their horrible misconceptions about the poor are, the easier it will be to gain support from the voting populace to improve conditions there, and the less uphill the fight will be to convince others that these people aren't lost causes cluttering up the streets of Vancouver's history.
The protesters never cared though. Even after being told by police to stop harassing people, even after being told off by people who've run businesses in the DTES for years, and working against the needs and wishes of the community in the DTES, they kept protesting.
And what population of them even live in the area? What population knows anything about the homeless that they're white-knighting? None of them. They're largely comprised of people from the suburbs, people who commute from all over the region to tell everyone how these people feel without ever asking them. Some leaders of the protest were even forced to give up their allegiances with organizations who actually aim to help the homeless populations, because their missions were so at odds and they were giving these charitable organizations such a bad name.
So the idea that trust-fund hipsters and well-meaning interlopers will thrust themselves violently and unnecessarily into a 'class warfare' which didn't exist (or wasn't as heated or unpleasant) before their interference isn't a strictly Oakland issue either. This behaviour, which focusses on driving people apart and creating open conflict where none existed, contrasts directly with what is necessary, which is for people to understand one another and interact.
It's understandable that you'd be upset if you knew this was a case of rich white kids playing the race card, but you don't -- all we know is that some of the protesters were white. Making generalizations is counterproductive.
"These are Burning Man hippies, self-styled artists, people who graduated from great schools with useless majors, and the usual constituent of the Bay Area's overprivileged poverty tourists: 20-30 y/o white kids from middle class families."
..because this is all obvious evidence of the article.
It's as if you are auditioning for the Glenn Beck show. That's probably where you belong
edit: Since when is political vitriol acceptable for HN? If I wanted to hear bullshit political rants with gems like "traditional blacks" or "fuck you and your dreadlocks", then I'd turn on Fox News or MSNBC. Seriously, traditional blacks with weasely scare quotes? That comment could not be less informative, disingenuous, or falsely provocative. It's like reading something by a slightly racist college freshman.
I believe the OP only put quotes around "traditional" because, in the very quote he lifted from the article, West Oakland is referred to as a traditionally black neighborhood. It is typical behavior to use quotes around words that relate directly back to the original source.
Ok, I apparently have a lot of time on my hands right now. No, it's completely non-standard to place quotes around just one word from an original source. Also, context is everything.
Do you understand that you are attacking some of your most powerful political allies, and that it is not helpful to solving the systemic issues contributing to poverty?
Interestingly, top-earners have been saying the same for decades when confronted with tax increases, all while having enjoyed an ever increasing share of the wealth pie. Food for thought.
This "top earner" wants more tax increases. I'm not alone. What I do not want is to be subject to violent attacks for getting up and going to work in the morning, nor to be compared to Glenn Beck for having no sympathy for the violent criminals doing so.
And I feel the same. But here's more food for thought: when you've nothing to lose, you basically lose it. And that, sadly, is where a lot of Americans have been heading since late 2007.
Like smash bus windows? There are other ways to solve problems. I help with some of them. Do you assume I don't, or do you just think violence is always the answer?
Since nobody has said that, I presume you don't really have an answer.
Edit: I see that you've edited your earlier comments since I replied to muddy things and make it look as though your straw man was part of the dialog all along.
What in the hell are you talking about? Who have I attacked? None of the people in this thread are my "most important political allies". Did you people read "political debate and logical fallacies for dummies"?
How does "fuck you and your dreadlocks" do anything to help people? Should I use that next time I'm volunteering at the soup kitchen? Really, there must be no hope for American politics, because this is probably the most idiotic exchange I'll have today.
I presume you have made some assumptions about me, like perhaps I helped to attack this bus? That's funny stuff.
> I presume you have made some assumptions about me
As you have made assumptions. Many of us are quite left-wing. I would be at home in a European socialist party.
However, the escalation to violence against people like me leaves me disinclined to do anything to help you. Giving you more resources would seem to be aiding dangerous criminals.
What assumption did I make about your politics? You wear your politics loudly enough so as to preclude any need for assumption. Why have you characterized me as a dangerous criminal? I just very simply do not suffer fools or borderline racists.
I'm glad that you'd fit in with the European socialists, but your thinking is just so remarkably confused that it's comical. Actually, this strongly qualifies you to be a European socialist, replete with broken populist social initiatives and all, so good on you.
If you think the post you replied to had any racist content in it, you either didn't even try to read it, or are functionally illiterate. The comment was replying appropriately to the linked article's racially-charged rhetoric.
Try both Tokyo and San Diego, plus consumer electronics. With well over 8000 employees, you will be calling 911 quite a lot. Perhaps notify the police of your complete insanity.
The bus remained where it was, the thought of driving to Mountain View with a broken window and flooded with cold air an unthinkable horror they could not endure.
Look at the pictures. Those buses typically don't have a "back" window (the very back panel of the bus is not a window). It is not very clear in the photo of this article but others show very clearly that the smashed window was on the side, near the back, just above the rear wheels. Driving at freeway speed with that side window smashed out would be very windy and cold in that bus.
The turbulence off the back of the bus could probably cause some significant wind inside of the bus, but 40mph wind certainly seems unlikely.
Of course relative comfort had little to do with why the bus did not continue on it's route unphased. Even city buses would stop for that sort of thing.
Gotta love “TECHIES: Your World Is Not Welcome Here”
I find it hard to sympathize with a bunch of lazy thugs who do nothing to improve their situation. Engineering and white collar jobs in general have always paid well. Industries who are in demand even more so, and for just reason. Did similar protests happen in Detroit 50 years ago during the auto boom? Did unskilled rubes that do nothing all day put up banners saying "Auto boys not welcome"?
This is absurd. Take control of your own damn life. Educate yourself and learn relevant skills. The resources are out there and more accessible than ever. Spend a few good hours in your public library every day for a year and walk out of there a changed person with valuable skills to offer.
My thoughts on this are, techies are generally nice and intelligent people. Last thing they will do is to harm someone or get to a physical fight. Unionised autoworkers wouldn't be a soft target. I really hope that this is a one off incident and not beginning of some demonifying of tech sector. Incidences like this could be shocking to some people and may change their perception about poor and helpless. In this thread itself, there are so many comments with words like leeches and useless thrown in.
Being a soft and easy target has to be part of it. It stands to reason that people who smash bus windows are the same people who used to beat up nerds at school when they were children. Some people set themselves up for a life of shit from the get go and never bother to change course.
I fully agree with you. But I think grown up nerds are far more successful and powerful than their highschool bullies counterparts. I am more afraid of good people turning into vendetta seekers because of this (your comment kind of resonates to what I am foreseeing as plausible outcome).
What I meant was that some people clearly never grow up past highschool. Instead of taking charge of their own lives, they choose to engage in childish games like bullying and name calling. They're still waiting for the teacher to bail them out and advance them to the next grade instead of leaving them behind until they put in the work necessary to pass the class. But there's no teacher waiting on you when you're in your 20s - the assumption is that you've grown up by now.
These kids never worked a day in their life, though. Their parents provided them with all the tools to succeed, but they still managed to fuck it up. They have no desire to improve themselves, they simply want to continue to leech off of whatever person will tolerate them the longest. Sickening.
Please don't marginalized the un/underemployed. There is unemployment in the US, and not everyone can or should be an entrepeneur. (Heck, plenty of us wealthy tech workers would not succeed as entrepeneurs).
The noblesse oblige is to demonstrate leadership by creating opportunities for honest workers.
Edit for clarity: null_ptr implied that the alternative to this behavior is "going to work". Other possibilities are "try to find work", or "be stuck because there is no work avaialable".
No sympathy for thugs and vandals. People who smash bus windows Friday morning have no place in civilized society. This has nothing to do with their employment situation. Why don't they go to the public library and learn some relevant skills? Learning opportunities that actually lead to well paid jobs are more accessible than ever. If you have the time to smash a bus window you have the time to learn skills that will uplift your spirit and place in this world.
The guy (or gal) above you is not marginalizing unemployment. They are trivializing the new leisure class as talked about by Thorstein Veblen. Except instead of conspicuous consumption, they are engaging in poverty tourism. Don't be fooled by these folks, they have well funded trust funds and have never worked a day in their life. Rather than buying a new car to inspire their neighbor's envy, they are trying to build credibility around their "worldliness". However, they are doing very little to actively improve the situation of those people actually struggling and disenfranchised.
Do you think that protesting a Google bus is a better usage of time for the unemployed than, say, improving one's marketable skills are applying for jobs?
I wouldn't defend these guys in particular, but I will say that things were vastly different in Detroit (and the U.S. in general) 50 years ago. Those unskilled people could much more easily become skilled to the point that they landed solidly in the middle class.
In general, there was much more opportunity to pull one's self up by the bootstraps, more even income distribution, and true mechanisms that allowed a rising tide to lift all boats.
You need a lot more skill to work in an auto plant than you need for serving up fast food. 50 years ago, auto production wasn't nearly as automated as it is today, so the guys on the assembly lines needed to know how to do welding and other skilled trades. Robots do a lot more of that stuff today.
As if the real problem with Oakland is that there are too many Google employees living there. Let's be honest - the only reason they do this is that Google employees sitting in a bus are a "soft" target. There is essentially zero chance of reprisal or consequence, at least if it's done as a one-off thing. You get to feel self-righteous for fighting "the man" without any risk.
Let's say they win this quixotic crusade and actually manage to force everyone with an income above $N to flee the area. What is the next step toward a better Oakland?
Yeah, I want to know what people think that alternative to gentrification is. Do they imagine that high income people will eventually just not live anywhere? Do they imagine that life would be better if all growth in the Bay Area were new construction sprawl out in the edges of the urban area where there's no displacement? Is it explicitly selfish, like, "go gentrify San Jose, those guys are assholes anyway"?
I don't have a dog in this fight, but there are some pretty obvious things you could do to fight the burden of gentrification on lower income original members of the population (they may have other side effects that are burdensome).
Off the top of my head:
- Massive taxes on "teardown" or size exploding renovations.
- Zoning laws that require at least 1 (or a % based) Section 8 unit per multi-unit development/renovation.
- Massive subsidies on empty lot development that implement affordable housing practices.
It would be even better if you implemented these changes throughout the entire metro area, not just the areas currently under development. But if you think protests by the poor for rich folks moving into their neighborhood are bad, wait until you see the inverse.
By "size exploding" do you mean "reducing the number of units"? Because then I might agree.
Really, though, allowing them to put up a high rise where there are currently single family homes reduces the overall pressure everywhere.
Of course, SF will never subsidize empty lot development, even if there were any empty lots to build on; the right to build in SF is far higher than in any other US city - double that of (as of 2007) Los Angeles or New York:
I don't know what you mean by "affordable housing practices", but the reality of it is building lots of housing units. You can subsidize the poor, but that will just push out those just rich enough not to qualify for the subsidies; it's a supply/demand problem, and the only solution is more supply or less demand.
Not saying it's correct or fair or appropriate in this situation with these protestors, but one philosophy is an equality-of-results (or even equality-of-opportunity, depending on how you interpret "opportunity"), that says "high income people should not be wealthy, should not enjoy the comforts of upper-middle-class existence, while the masses are poor"
"a soft target. There is essentially zero chance of reprisal or consequence."
Yes, because people are looking for hard targets. Cops don't carry guns because if they confront someone they want the odds to be "even steven". The US doesn't use drones and bombers and machine guns in Afghanistan, because they want it to be a fair fight between the soldiers and the native population.
Wow, you figured out that they did something where they wouldn't all be immediately arrested and tossed in jail, that's a brilliant observation. Now explain how the people who would arrest them, with their guns and radios and SWAT teams and helicopters don't work things so that they don't go after soft targets as well?
Fact is these people all have much more massive balls than 90% of the effete whiners and snivelers here and everyone knows it. I'd love to see rich liberatarian fairies like Keith Rabois or Peter Thiel go to Oakland public housing and get up in people's faces and tell them what they think should be done with them.
Is it just me, or does the psuedo-intellectual/conspiratorial rhetoric used in this post make anybody else uncomfortable? I feel like class warfare tends to start with misplaced high-mindedness, as if there is an element of being "in the know" for those who take part in the violence. Obviously the author thought writing this way would help further his cause, so what does that say about the participants? Too uninformed to know the difference? Too angry to care?
I take that bus routinely (though not this morning), and I can assure you that its occupants are a diverse group of East Bay residents of many races and ethnicities (black, white, asian, hispanic, etc), and though I haven't done a survey, I doubt any of us are 1%s.
Many of us, myself included, support strongly progressive economic policies, but there is no real conversation to be had with people who will resort to violence like this. Sadly, use of violent and illegal methods to convey a message seems to be somewhat common in these parts.
I suspect that these "protesting" groups are acting out some sort of imagined war between rich and poor, and since the real 1% don't take a bus of any kind to work, we're their next best target.
In our industry we are privileged. I am not sure another time in history when anyone (almost) could bootstrap themselves to relative wealth compared to their neighbours and families with determined effort rather than hard labour and luck (such as the gold rush or being born into wealth). To assume that there is no problem, that everything is fine and people are just upset for the hell of it is hubris. We could become the new oil barons, and be glad of low wages so we can live like kings. Or we could adjust to our wealth, at least acknowledge it and even if you never donate to your local foodbank or get involved with a local community group or night school, understand that you have privilege. Noblesse oblige and all that.
Who said there is no problem? Not me. I'm aware and upset about many of the same problems. However, I think smashing bus windows under presumption that those inside are uniquely responsible for the problems sends the conversation backwards, not forwards.
As a resident of Oakland who is sick to death of professional protesters slapping agit-prop posters on any available surface (not least community-financed public artwork), fuck these people and everything they stand for. And no, I don't work for some billion $ startup or even a million $ one, I'm the sort of starving artist that they claim to be fighting for, but aren't.
>> Many tech employees currently reside in these locations and have driven up the property values and rent prices, creating animosity, evictions, and poverty.
“Bus driver, what are you gonna do, man? What are you gonna do?”
“Don’t worry. It’s freedom of speech, freedom of speech.”
The kind young man then walked to the rear of the bus, saying,
“Oh my god! What’s gonna happen next?”
The same female passenger took out her phone and began filming the blockade.
“At least we’re warm in here and they’re cold out there,” she said.
The nice thing about 'journalism' like this is that when you just make shit up to improve your 'story', there's nobody to hold you accountable.
"driven up the property values and rent prices, creating animosity, evictions, and poverty"
I'm sorry but I can't imagine the gentrification has caused poverty. It's probably made it more inconvenient and pushed out people in poverty though.
But for people who have seen their rents go up while working the same jobs at roughly the same pay, you can see that a larger percentage of their pay goes to rent.
Zoning laws creating an artificial scarcity of housing has caused the rent prices to skyrocket - already before that the prices were high enough to cause a boom in building lots of living space, if the city (by their voters) would allow it.
I'm not too familiar with the SF housing legal environment, but in some places a lack of new housing is caused by preservation boards that are willing to declare, e.g., chain link fences as historical structures to prevent new development in their areas.
If "Gentrification is a dynamic and nuanced problem", perhaps throwing bricks through windows is not the best approach to finding a solution.
I'm not convinced that "gentrification" is always a problem. Must prices always remain the same? Am I entitled to be protected from competing as a buyer with other buyers who can put scarce housing resources to more valuable alternative uses, for example allowing someone else to commute to a job at Google, rather than allowing me to work a pizza place? This is not condescending, I have, and I wasn't surprised that I couldn't afford housing near the private university, or fancy corporate campuses at that time.
Furthermore, if we think housing prices are a problem, perhaps we should look at zoning and density. If entrenched interests prevent a majority consensus from altering zoning laws, then try throwing some bricks.
Has that happened in SF and I just don't know about it?
> "While they took their seats, several people unfurled two giant banners reading “TECHIES: Your World Is Not Welcome Here” and “FUCK OFF GOOGLE.”
People holding banners that were laser printed with materials synthesized by complex machines. People with cell phones tucked away in their pockets. People who have used Google a million times.
You're right, the root cause here is jealously, boredom, and a typical bully attitude.
However technology is a core feature of the root cause that the protesters claim. They are not angry at moderately wealthy workers in general, they are angry at moderately wealthy workers from technology companies in particular. They make this excruciatingly clear.
And do not even think of telling me that the only wealthy people in SF are those working for technology companies. That is bullshit, and you know it.
They are angry at companies who provide corporate busses to make neighborhoods more comfortable for their employees than they are for other people, rather than supporting public infrastructure that everyone benefits from.
As to your comment about 'bullshit' - you seem kind of angry.
The irony still stands: these people benefit from tech workers' products, but they still want Googlers to "fuck off" and "get the fuck out." So it's NIMBY-ism -- just like the placement of cell towers, Google employees have to live somewhere. People want to benefit but nobody wants to shoulder the cost.
There's no irony unless you see the world in black and white.
It's not particularly surprising that most people use Google, given that it has a monopoly in search.
That is irrelevant to the possibility that the influx of Googlers - aided by private infrastructure from the corporation - may be destructive to the community that is protesting.
Careful, your bias is showing. Despite no photos of the banners, and the banners being described as having been 'unfurled' (suggesting cloth) you declare them to be laser-printed.
There is no irony to be had when you manufacture the story.
And? The OP was talking about it as fact despite not having seen the banners. The bias is still there.
As for laser printers, exactly how much of the printer industry is Google involved in? These people are targetting Google. Google doesn't make or promote printers. Yourself and the OP are creating a strawman just so you can burn them.
So, like I said, your bias is showing. There is no irony here, and certainly none 'at an all time high'.
It's faster to damage a single bus than slash 100 tires.
The protesters don't care about the state of rush hour. They care about what the corporate buses represent: large tech corporations increasing the wealth gap and raising rent in SF/Oakland. It's a fact that each stalled bus will have a bottom-line impact on Google or one of its partners.
That said, smashing windows is not an effective way to win allies. It just makes it a little bit easier to dismiss opponents of gentrification as supporters of vandalism. These "activists" are alienating the very public officials who would otherwise support measures that favor existing residents (e.g. rent control and stabilization).
I can't imagine they were protesting the literal act of using a bus to ferry employees to work. Rather this was an easy way to target members of a group the protestors feel wronged by/animosity towards.
I think the situation would be drastically different if the buses didn't exist, for better or worse. Workers would make completely different choices in where they live, and it's not likely they would choose the same neighborhoods that the buses afford them the convenience of. And just maybe SV companies would change their highly suburban and unsustainable real estate policies. Just because 1 bus going form a to b is better than 100 cars going from a to b doesn't justify the policy of the buses or even demonstrate they're sustainable.
By providing free transportation from SF Google employees are encouraged to live there. Why not live closer to work? It would probably result in a few more cars on the road but a lot of the employees would move closer to Google freeing up apartments for people who actually work at businesses in SF and HAVE to live there.
Even with the few new construction projects happening in MTV, it's not enough to house everyone. Apartments go incredibly fast.
Google employees are competing with all the other big companies in the South Bay(EBay/Apple/Facebook amongst others) plus the yearly influx of interns that takes a bunch of apartments off the market for 6 months at a time.
You are right, it is precisely bullying. As is typical of people in far left political organizations, these protestors are using the alleged oppression of themselves and others, as an excuse to bully other people, in this case nerds.
Yeah - people shouldn't complain - they should just shut up and get a job that pays them a 6 figure salary and provides an air conditioned luxury coach to take them to work.
Edit: Oh, heh. I mis-read your statement. Regardless, I'll keep my original comment below. Do with it what you will.
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1) 6-figures is middle-of-the-road when it comes to meeting living expenses in SV. You will never own an urban house (and will likely not own a suburban house) on that salary in the area.
2) Have you, like, ever ridden in a big bus before? They're pretty nausea-inducing and tend to get stuck in the same traffic that every other ground vehicle gets stuck in. Their only advantages are traffic reduction and (maybe, if you can fight the nausea) the ability to catch up on email during your commute in.
3) I did the commute-down-the-peninsula thing for a couple of years. It was also pretty miserable and not very cheap (but far cheaper than owning, parking, and maintaining a car). I can't argue that Caltrain is worse than these buses, but I can argue that they're both pretty miserable.
Google isn't trying to encourage people who work at Google to live in San Francisco: they are trying to encourage people who live in San Francisco to work at Google.
It's the same reason they have such a honkin' big office in the middle of Manhattan. They could much more cheaply have an office park out in western New Jersey, but having the office in Manhattan captures a large number of employees who want to live in New York City, and would end up working at a hedge fund to support their NYC-habit.
Likewise, they probably found themselves interviewing a lot of great people who turned down the job because they lived in San Francisco and couldn't deal with the commute, and would rather find a different job than leave San Francisco. (Or employees who were commuting by car/rail and were quitting because they couldn't handle it any more.) The buses were probably a cheaper / more satisfactory solution than setting up a new office.
Far less so than having to live where you work, rather than being able to live where you want to live. Particularly since they have a bus to ride.
People get on the backs of companies like Foxconn for corporate housing, but that is essentially what they are proposing that Google employees endure. And why? Because as "non-natives", Google employees somehow become some sort of second class citizen in the minds of these fools. They have as much right to live in those neighborhoods as anybody else.
It's obviously a balance. Usually the reason you want to live somewhere has something to do with activities you want to perform while physically being there. So if you're working 10 hours a day and commuting 2 hours a day, that leaves you four hours a day to actually be awake where you live. At some point it's not worth living somewhere you like if you're only going to actually be there a tiny portion of each day.
I don't think baddox is necessarily suggesting corporate housing, just housing that doesn't involve an hour-plus commute each way. Living closer to your workplace gives you a few extra hours each week - it's your choice whether to spend them at work or home.
He is advocating more restrictions (not enforced by law or company policy, admittedly, but driven by community violence) on housing options for Google employees.
Whether the remaining options are owned by Google, or a limited set of independent corporations and landlords is of little consequence. The result is that the employee is forced to live closer to work instead of where they please, serving as a constant reminder that their life truly does revolve around their employer.
What he is suggesting is dehumanizing.
In answer to the original query: "Why not live closer to work?"
Because that is not where they fucking want to live. They should be permitted to live anywhere that they have the ability and means to live. De-facto zoning of residential areas as off limits to employees of particular companies is insanity.
If you ask those aboard the Google bus, you'll get various answers, like "I don't mind the commute" or "I love SF, there's so much to do here."
> Why not live in San Francisco?
Tech workers in Mountain View will give you "I'd rather spend time with my family than on the road" or "I don't really want to live in a large city" or any number of totally individual, valid, human reasons.
The point is that these people live where they chose to live. There are many reasons that they factor into their decision, but it remains their decision. Not the decision of some trust-fund professional protesters.
Not at all. What makes you think that? The only thing I'm advocating is that if your non-work life is important to you (like it is with most people), eliminating commute time is one obvious way to expand that part of your life.
1) Maybe they got the job at Google half way through their year lease in SF and are relying on the bus to get to work for 6 months until they can move.
2) Maybe they are fresh out of college and still live in their family home in SF and are only using the bus to get to their new job while they save up enough to move closer.
3) Maybe they live in SF because it is equal distance from their job south and their partner's job north or east.
4) Maybe they are in that group of people that thinks jobs come and go but your home is your home. These people don't move closer to their job.
That said, nobody HAS to live in SF. A fair number of people actually commute INTO SF.
It is mind-boggling the number of employees that Google manages to stuff onto their main campus. A large number of employees do live in Mountain View, but many also live in SF and in East Bay.
Those who live in the city proper have plenty of financial incentives to not live there; I can't imagine that they'd suddenly move en masse to the suburbs just because Google took their double-decker WiFi-enabled buses away.
I imagine that, like most highly educated people, the people making these decisions do not think that the impact of Google employees on rent is their concern.
This is because in a free market, housing is like any other good. Some people happen to be particularly affected when competition drives up the price of a given good. But it is not for individuals to try to mitigate this effect. The most efficient and fair outcome is for the government to redistribute money, and for the poor to spend their money however they feel is best.
This is not libertarianism, it is basic economic theory that is shared by moderates on the left and right.
So Google has no moral obligation, or indeed any good reason, to discourage their workers from living in SF.
No - it would be better to have those 100 people living down near where they work - in Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Fremont, Santa Clara, Milpitas, etc. The GBus only solves a problem it creates currently.
I am not taking any side, but I don't think this argument is valid. If there were no shuttles, I think most of the Google employees would prefer to stay close to MTV instead of an hour away. I know that I would not like to drive for at least an hour on each side in traffic on 101 everyday. I would just rent an apartment in MTV or Palo Alto.
In that case they should be smashing windows at City Hall (or not anywhere, preferably). The municipality must be up to its gills in property tax cash and is the only people who can properly manage the response to this skyrocketing demand for housing. This isn't Vancouver or Tokyo or Manhattan, there's room to build more housing and drive down the supply/demand imbalance, and money to be made doing it... but without the municipality leading the way on intensification, it's not going to get better.
I don't see that happening unless the people who already own property in the city suddenly decide en masse that they're okay with repealing laws that prevent you from building tall apartment complexes to preserve the "look" of the city.
As far as I recall, the power to decide how things should be rests with all the people, not just the landlords. The renters outnumber them, and they have the ability, the rights and the reason to achieve cheaper rents by allowing to build apartment complexes.
True, but a renter is also disincentivized to vote for allowing people to build apartment complexes because of NIMBYism -- they don't want to be kicked out of their current living arrangements so that someone can spend 6 months building a new apartment complex in its place that might have lower rent.
The people who would unabashedly vote for the repeal such laws would likely be the people who don't live in SF yet but who want to live/move there.
I'm not sure what those several hundred people who were living there were doing for housing while construction was underway, though. Maybe the "moving expenses" that the landlord covered included assistance with locating new temporary places to live?
Correction, 'affordable housing for some not all' is what's implied here - there's not enough housing for all, and the only way it's going to stay affordable, given the current housing policy, is if all the googlers get kicked out of the place for good.
In any case, if they want affordable housing, the only proper way is to fight for increased supply of housing, not reduce demand of housing by using violence to drive people away.
Ultimately, the issue comes down to housing supply - a problem created both by long-time locals and municipal governments. It's the same exact story in other places, particularly here in Manhattan. Would this problem exist if the number of apartments/houses kept up with the number of people who wanted them? There are answers to this dilemma, but they are politically unpalatable to many. See a previous comment of mine for more:
Short version: build a lot more, and put a regulation in place to keep the "look" of the new buildings similar/the same to the current neighborhood/buildings being replaced.
People want to live in these places. People need to be near jobs. People will avoid commuting if they can. People want to be near cultural institutions. Many people want to be near lots of other people. Look at the housing shortage in North Dakota - before the energy boom, no shortage. People move in because of jobs - shortage, and very high prices. In that case, building, rather than policies did not keep up (there are answers here as well, particularly prefab / modular housing.)
The number of people in cities (particularly large ones, but smaller ones as well) continues to grow (again, see link.) Our policies (in particular) need to adjust.
"While this is taking place, the City of Oakland and Federal law enforcement are attempting to spread a surveillance network called the Domain Awareness Center throughout Oakland. Intended to secure the Port of Oakland against terrorist attacks and labor struggle, this surveillance network will actually monitor the entirety of Oakland through over 800 cameras. The authorities want to monitor the crazy and uncontrollable city that is pressed right up against the Port of Oakland."
Would be interesting to get the coords of the cameras when they go up on iSee[0], so people can take the necessary action to avoid them. It would be interesting in general if someone made a mobile app where people can stand where cameras are (and take a photo of it for some spacial awareness) and submit the coords to a public database where people can take the data and plot their own paths away from a central server.
I'm seeing a lot of vitriol and generalizations in this thread. It's understandable to be upset about this, but automatically assuming that the protesters are "lazy trustafarians" leeching off of the tech community is not a mindset that is helpful to anybody. If anything, it just escalates the situation. The approach we should be taking is: what is the problem, why are people upset, how do we solve it. Of course smashing the Google bus is not a productive way to protest. But the tech community needs to take the high road, not the low road. Making sweeping generalizations only creates more anger and thus makes the situation worse.
Pain and fear do not tend to lead to rational approaches to complex problems. People's lives are getting worse, and they're not thinking through the problem fully - just lashing out at the most visible, proximate cause.
It's the same pattern one sees in anti-immigration efforts - outsiders competing for a limited resource (jobs, housing) reduces the consumer surplus of the in-group. The traditional response to this throughout most of human history is along the lines of "attack the encroaching tribe", so we're actually doing better than the historical baseline.
Of course, the much-better-response - "let's respond to an increase in demand with an increase in supply by lifting zoning restrictions and allowing for more housing" - isn't intuitive enough or emotionally evocative enough to get a crowd.
They're an obvious soft-target. An easy target that they can attack without penalty.
The "obvious target" would be to do this in the middle of the city, to raise better awareness of their anger and their message. As it is, this is simply an unknown attack on a bus. Even the spin-propaganda blog post is very unclear on what the problem is...
The tech companies, and Google in particular have far more power and resources at their disposal and are actively trying to change society in numerous different ways. They choose not to use this power to improve the local community, instead insulating themselves from the problems by providing their employees with a way to ignore the lack of infrastructure around them.
What 'constructive ways' would you suggest people without money or power use to change the system?
I dunno. They can always become the next Google or Facebook and do something with THEIR money.
These mega-corps grew from nothing in only ~20 years. The new rich of America is NOT like the "old rich" of Wall Street. Basically any no-name nobody with 5 guys working in a basement can become the next Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Youtube, Pinterest, Groupon, Zynga or whatever.
It's hard to take this comment seriously. It's clearly absurd, because otherwise we'd have 100,000s of new multi-billion dollar corporations, instead of a small handful.
I'm starting to think it's more likely that you meant it sarcastically.
Not multi-billion, but there are definitely thousands upon thousands of multi-tens-of-million dollar companies.
There was a recent study on the "new upper class" of the USA. Most of it is "new money": first-generation millionares and first-generation billionares.
Oh fuck you and your dreadlocks.
There are only two photos on that page, so I don't definitively know who these protesters were (although there are no "traditional" blacks in those photos) -- but I know (I have a strong suspicion, I don't factually know) that the protesters were not drawn from the group mentioned above. These are Burning Man hippies, self-styled artists, people who graduated from great schools with useless majors, and the usual constituent of the Bay Area's overprivileged poverty tourists: 20-30 y/o white kids from middle class families.
The actual, working, poor people in West Oakland were at their first of the two or three jobs they hold. Or they were spending a few rare moments resting, or with their kids. Or they were lining up to get a meal at community kitchen. Actual black people were not part of this protest, because a mob of black people attacking a bus would be getting wall-to-wall coverage on every channel. It would have been responded to with a swift and overwhelming police presence.
The same thing happened a few years ago when these same non-workers shut down the Port of Oakland in the name of workers. The people who actually work the port asked that they not disrupt the port, but in the end these dreadlocked, shiftless complainers cost those longshoremen a day in wages -- Viva El Proletariado!
What we have today is a group of young, electively poor white kids who are upset that the price of unheated lofts and dingy Victorians are being driven up by people who have the means and motivation to actually own and improve them. That they wrap themselves up in the image of the poor (and yes, mostly black) -- whom they themselves displaced by rushing in to bid up rents with mom and dad's money -- makes this appeal all the more ludicrous. At least the tech gentrifiers will actually improve the fucking place, unlike these leeches!
(Source: I live and own property in Oakland)
Edited as suggested below by bonemachine.