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The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

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Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#311

Post by clock_tower »

Animats wrote: post #244
xr4ti wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Thugs. Drugs. Drive by shootings. The east bay is a burning trash heap with no redeeming value. Please do not move here.

When I moved to Menlo Park in 1987, there was automatic weapons fire from Whiskey Gulch every weekend. It was all liquor stores and bars, hence the name. The fried chicken outlet there had full transparent bulletproofing, heavier than some banks. East Palo Alto was Murder City, USA. Tiny Whiskey Gulch, about three city blocks, had the highest murder rate per square mile in the US. I thought I was moving into a declin…

> The final solution to the underclass was thus implemented.

If "final solution" refers to relocating people, what term will you use if they're deliberately killed?

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#312

Post by jdavis703 »

kevinburke wrote: post #168
e40 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Four large apartment buildings in the East Bay have been burned by arsonists (likely the same one or group) in the last year. One in Uptown a few weeks ago. One, in Emmeryville was burned down twice . I agree, we need to build more housing. It seems it's not quite that simple, though.

As an example of how Bay Area housing politics are silly.. there is a document that local governments use that purports to show that building more housing creates demand for even more housing, and use it to justify not building things. By that logic, these arsons will help reduce rents in Oakland... it makes no sense.

The idea of induced demand can't be discounted, that said building housing doesn't have the same negative impacts as building more highest lane miles, so the fact that it could induce demand is not as bad. Just keep building housing until every person who wants a roof over their head has one.

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#313

Post by astrange »

ben_jones wrote: post #59
smashingfiasco wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just want to point out that Detroit built itself this way through the 1950's and 1960's. At the time, urban planners thought it would be efficient and sensible design. What ended up happening, though, is that as factories shuttered, the neighborhoods that were built around them started to collapse. The net result was pockets of localized decay, that eventually led to the entire urban area rotting as more people left.…

I had a similar thought seeing all the office/luxury condo construction going up in Redwood City. Their can't be more then a handful of "large" tech companies in the immediate vicinity and what will happen when they inevitably downsize (as almost all companies do over the course of decades...)?

RWC is a great place to commute as far as Hayward, SJ near 101, or SF near Caltrain. I wouldn’t be worried about living there at all.

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#314

Post by aantix »

ghthor wrote: post #159
richardknop wrote: post #97

I think remote working really is a part of solution to this. Perhaps augmented/virtual reality could be a good solution for some sort of application to have remote meetings with colleagues with headset in a virtual room/scenery and collaborate like that. It could be used for daily standups and other meetings and it would remove the social isolation problem of remote working and make it much more feasible. Is any AR/V…

Bigscreen is the closest I've seen to working on this.

Link : http://bigscreenvr.com/

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#315

Post by astrange »

WalterBright wrote: post #305
wbl wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cupertino didn't let them.

Apple has enormous influence, and Jobs was a very good salesman. Maybe Apple didn't try very hard.

Cupertino voted down the attempt to replace Vallco with mixed-use because it might increase traffic. They’d rather have the corpse of a mall than anything apparently.

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#316

Post by cat199 »

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #139
vidoc wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Riding BART into and out of SF as a commute is ridiculous at a new level nowadays. Especially given the shocking number of uneducated people who insist on keeping their backpacks on their shoulders despite the train being packed. Totally pisses me off!

Placing the backpack at your feet takes almost the same space, unless you are really fat, plus it becomes a tripping hazard and gets kicked.

It's called 'straddling'.

This way, the space between your legs (which is about the same width as your shoulders) serves as a convenient location to store said bag, while also allowing you to stand over it and thereby protect it from trips/kicks and reduce your overall surface footprint.

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#317

Post by cat199 »

randomdata wrote: post #310
potatolicious wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "or is that a nonsense thing to say in the States?" It's a nonsense thing to say in front of the educated American elite. Most of America agrees with you, but as we've seen, there is a disturbing trend amongst American elites to mock anyone who is unwilling to sacrifice their families, communities, and networks in the name of career development/personal advancement. I'm not into most aspects of the populism that is…

> Most of America agrees with you The ever increasing urbanization rate suggests otherwise. If the majority of Americans had stuck close to their families, these cities would be small settlements at best, and maybe wouldn't even exist at all. In reality, the high cost (which may come in the form of lower income) of living elsewhere has pushed most into these cities.

Just because one relocates out of economic necessity doesn't mean that was their best preference or philosophical ideology.

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#318

Post by astrange »

wu-ikkyu wrote: post #150
nck4222 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhh, ever hear about the depression, dot com bubble, great recession/housing market crash? You're basically advocating "Let's do nothing, the market always corrects itself." Which is true to an extent, but in the extreme it also ruins lives, the country, and itself left unchecked during this process. This is why a completely unregulated market is a horrible idea. Government needs to step in at certain times. This mig…

Isn't government intervention the reason why real estate prices are so high there in the first place?

You’d need government intervention to keep prices low, too. What if there‘s no zoning, but also no support to build sewer systems and transit? What if the NIMBYs start practicing arson?

Libertarianism won’t get you anywhere with social problems.

(This is besides the basic issue where loans mean prices don’t matter, so they’re free to go up…)

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#319

Post by astrange »

thatfrenchguy wrote: post #200
nemonemo wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) I believe so. Once Google goes into Diridon, enough young people would gather around the station, businesses would also gather, higher-density buildings will go up, start ups will start to gather as well. 2) Cupertino is close enough to Stanford and Moffett, which were the two centers of initial Silicon Valley. Morgan Hill and Brentwood are quite far. Still, its population and real estate markets will grow. 3) Hig…

Cupertino is so ridiculously boring that no one wants to live there though.

You must not like milk tea.

Re: The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups

#320

Post by timr »

eastbayjake wrote: post #298
timr wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Wishing people would just leave is what the NIMBY organizations have been trying for decades." ...and yet, this crisis is only about 5 years old. Between 2008 and 2012, San Francisco rents were going down , not up. San Francisco's population declined in the 1980s. Say what you will about construction rates, but this is an acute housing crisis, brought on by an asset bubble, instigated by historically low interest ra…

This is manifestly untrue. The city has been out of vacant land since 1954 and common talk of a "housing crisis" in San Francisco started in at least 1966 [0]. We have been failing to build enough housing to meet demand for decades. What is true is that for decades people who came here at some time in the past complain about how newcomers are overturning its way of life, despite having been newcomers themselves at on…

"This is manifestly untrue."

Actually, everything I wrote is a fact, and you can verify it. SF rents went down as recently as 2012, and are currently in a pronounced, acute period of hyperinflation [1]. San Francisco's population declined rather dramatically from 1950-1980 [2]

I'm sorry if this doesn't fit with your preferred narrative, but citing opinion articles does not provide data for your position.

[1] https://medium.com/@mccannatron/1979-to-2015-average-rent-in...

[2] https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/2FrCiZiCNaMFiUqWC_RK8sh3NnU=...

Edit: even your sfist link confirms the basic facts, despite its (inaccurate and hyperbolic) headline. To wit:

"Dips in the population, urban flight, and a decaying Edwardian housing stock — much of which was built between 1907 and 1910 and was in great disrepair by 1970, when areas like Alamo Square were extremely "low-rent" and dilapidated — may have made life cheaper for the hippies, but that all began to change by the early 1980s."

So yeah...SF hasn't "always" been an expensive city. No more than any other city, anyway.

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