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The Silicon Valley paradox: one in four people are at risk of hunger

theguardian.com

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Re: The Silicon Valley paradox: one in four people are at risk of hunger

#171

Post by BeetleB »

wpietri wrote: post #144
Helmet wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, she can move. If she cannot afford to live there, she can move. It sucks, but life sucks and sometimes it means you can't live exactly where or how you want to. My parents worked as "pickers" for the Home Shopping Network near DC, making minimum wage. It became financially untenable, so they moved to southern Virginia to a place with good schools and where you can live and get by on low income salaries.

That your parents once did something in different circumstances does not mean everybody can here and now. Even if we value family connections on a pure cash basis -- which I don't recommend -- moving can be bad for people. E.g., the cost of replacing grandparents with professional childcare can be astronomical. Family also provides an economic buffer against the ups and downs that are especially hard on the poor. Wha…

>That your parents once did something in different circumstances does not mean everybody can here and now.

Many can.

In my city (nowhere near SV), the cost of living is a bit high. I knew a bunch of low skilled workers who worked in restaurants, cleaning dishes, cooking, etc. They were all fairly close. When rents started shooting up a few years ago, they got together and made a plan - and moved to the Midwest, buying houses in the $40-80K range.

One of the mechanics I used to go to: Same story. Ended up moving to Texas where it is cheaper.

Most cases where I've seen that it is not an option fall into two categories:

1. A desire to be near very high quality services (e.g. one person's kids would get almost free health care from a neighboring university's hospital). Essentially, a desire to keep high quality tax discounted services. These people are making a choice - they can move if they wanted to.

2. People in some kind of hole - usually a financial hole. They want to stay pretty badly so they make poor financial choices, ending up in debt, with poor credit, etc. That makes it harder to go, well, anywhere. That's why the smart thing to do is move before you fall into that hole.

As someone who has lived in places, and grown up in places, where essentially we could have been forced out legally (and in one case actually were), I know what it feels like. And the solution for us was very obvious: Know that we do not have a right to stay where we were, and make contingency plans. For me, part of the contingency plan was to try to move some place that was much less likely to kick us out.

Re: The Silicon Valley paradox: one in four people are at risk of hunger

#172

Post by newshorts »

ballenarosada wrote: post #162
mjfl wrote: post #3

Why pay $2000 a month when you have the whole country you could live in for much less? Why should I have to pay increased taxes for your ignorance/provincialism? Is living in San Francisco a fundamental right? I grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska. I'd suggest that these people move there, for the low cost of living combined with the vibrant-enough economy. Unemployment was at 5% through the great recession . However, I fin…

Why should longtime residents have to leave the Bay Area because of your ignorance/piles of money? Is living in San Francisco a fundamental right?

Some of us tech workers might be poorer than you think.

Foreign investment in housing is also putting upward pressure on cost of living.

As with most things, the problem is more complex.

Re: The Silicon Valley paradox: one in four people are at risk of hunger

#173

Post by ballenarosada »

Helmet wrote: post #130
Joe-Z wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What do you do with the people left behind? What do you do with the engineers once they've written all the software to automate our daily lives? But haven't you read what the very empathetic and kind poster before suggested as an answer?: These fucking losers should move to whatever hill cave's still vacant, because they are to blame for not having gotten rich fast enough. I really like your writing, very precise an…

There is no such thing as "fair redistribution" - it's theft through political means and it will just further obscure the market. You will end up exacerbating the problem. The solution is to build more housing and stop subsidizing one-another, so that those that can afford to live there do and those that cannot move.

So, those that cannot afford to live in SF: hill caves.

Re: The Silicon Valley paradox: one in four people are at risk of hunger

#174

Post by ballenarosada »

someguydave wrote: post #149
Joe-Z wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What do you do with the people left behind? What do you do with the engineers once they've written all the software to automate our daily lives? But haven't you read what the very empathetic and kind poster before suggested as an answer?: These fucking losers should move to whatever hill cave's still vacant, because they are to blame for not having gotten rich fast enough. I really like your writing, very precise an…

Your "option of taxing and fair redistribution" is actually a monstrous dictatorship. Every time it has been tried, many have perished and the median wealth has declined.

I see you hit upon the same critique that Marx has of the German Social Democratic Platform. There's no such thing as fair distribution, there's only class war. Prepare to be rinsed.

Re: The Silicon Valley paradox: one in four people are at risk of hunger

#175

Post by lr4444lr »

dragonwriter wrote: post #126
lr4444lr wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh please: how do the homeless streaming into NYC find their way over in the first place? But let's be charitable: we can fund a one-way ticket back, first class, to their state of residence at a vastly cheaper cost than for housing them on expensive land they will never be productive enough to work their way out of. EDIT: (Because the preceding was hatsher than it had to be without explicit statement of the upside)…

> Oh please: how do the homeless streaming into NYC find their way over in the first place? If it's anything like the mentally ill streaming into SF in some parts of recent history, they are shipped there by outside localities (lots of that's happened with one-way bus tickets for homeless in various directions on the west coast, too, aside from Nevada shipping mentally ill to SF.) > But let's be charitable: we can fu…

Yes, same problem, and what's worse is that the Right to Shelter laws specifically governing the city forbid it from applying any type of requirements to be checked beforehand for emergency shelter eligibility. No need to prove residence, lack of income, etc. You show up at the social services offices, city is mandated to find housing for you that night for up to the limit (I think 30 days) by which time you either have to prove eligibility for long term homeless shelter entry, or else you can get back on the same line for the emergency shelter again. Brilliant system.

NYC has 10% of the entire USA's homeless population. Significantly more if you count the (probably large) percentage of the 635,000 or so in public housing who will almost never be able to afford even rent-stabilized apartments, and it is estimated that another 50% of that number live in that public housing off-lease.

About 10% - 15% of NYC homeless are formally listed as last address "outside NYC". But that likely vastly undercounts, because people might have had a relative or friend where they crashed for a few months, weeks... just long enough to get addresses for a few ids/bills to be switched over.

There simply isn't any more cheap land with good public transit infrastructure for new low cost housing, a huge low-skilled (often illegal) immigrant population, and no one wants to face reality.

Re: The Silicon Valley paradox: one in four people are at risk of hunger

#176

Post by nine_k »

kafkaesq wrote: post #166
epistasis wrote: post #112

Housing problem. There's not enough of it, and the people that moved here in the 1960s have fought tooth and nail from more people being able to move here. It's a completely artificial construct that drives up the cost of living and robs the poor with rent seeking. All of California's inequality problems go back to that. High salaries for some people help make it stronger, but the greed of the NIMBY homeowners is a f…

It's a completely artificial construct that drives up the cost of living and robs the poor with rent seeking. It's called "zoning", and it's a perfectly natural construct. And if you're going to be fair, you'd acknowledge that ultimately it presents a set of tradeoffs , with both positive and negative impact. All of California's inequality problems go back to that. Inequality is a very complex problem, with many forc…

Zoning is not natural, the way the law of gravity, or even the idea of liberty, is natural.

Zoning is invented by people, as you correctly noticed, to balance several trade-offs. Maybe in 1950s it was adequate; since 2000s, the balance of trade-offs has shifted drastically.

Maybe it's time to rebalance things. The problem is that those who profited form it most (the old realty owners), due to that very fact, can also afford to spend most resources (as in time, money, and lobbying efforts) to resist it.

Re: The Silicon Valley paradox: one in four people are at risk of hunger

#177

Post by ballenarosada »

workthrowaway27 wrote: post #165
CocaKoala wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your proposal is that the single parent work a second job in order to move to Nebraska. Who takes care of her child while she does this? Does the kid go to child care? How does the single parent pay for the child care? Does she need to get a third job to pay for the expense of her second job? What happens when the car she takes to work breaks down, and wipes out her savings? What about when she gets sick because s…

That's an uncharitable interpretation of OP's point of view. I interpreted OP as saying something like: these people obviously can't afford to live where they are now, they don't have an reasonable expectation of being able to do so anytime soon, so they need to change what they're doing rather than expecting someone to come rescue them.

This usually looks like homelessness. I think the OP doesn't admit any more charitable interpretation. If you think "change what they're doing" is a cogent policy position, then I don't know what to do with you

Re: The Silicon Valley paradox: one in four people are at risk of hunger

#178

Post by ballenarosada »

workthrowaway27 wrote: post #160
ballenarosada wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many of these people do you think can afford to move? You're proposing to create a ghetto out of the Midwest, but the plan is stupid even on its own terms.

Can they afford not to move?

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that "can afford" is a positively barbaric rubric for deciding what people do with their lives.

Re: The Silicon Valley paradox: one in four people are at risk of hunger

#179

Post by ballenarosada »

mjfl wrote: post #10
OfficialJoeGG wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes that rent trap is to high. You pay three quarters of your paycheck to just living (even house hunting you still need a place to live). You then have one quarter to spend on food (for 2 people) & electricity, water, and heat (if your rent doesn't cover utilities)& maybe some extra things like hygiene products, bills such as car payments, etc... You have almost no left over to put in for moving. So I don't di…

I don't believe it. Say you find a place in Lincoln for $500-$600 (which is possible in Lincoln), just by using the difference between old rent and new to cover debt from moving expenses, a mover could pay off $15,000 of debt within one year.

So do it yourself

Re: The Silicon Valley paradox: one in four people are at risk of hunger

#180

Post by zkms »

kafkaesq wrote: post #166
epistasis wrote: post #112

Housing problem. There's not enough of it, and the people that moved here in the 1960s have fought tooth and nail from more people being able to move here. It's a completely artificial construct that drives up the cost of living and robs the poor with rent seeking. All of California's inequality problems go back to that. High salaries for some people help make it stronger, but the greed of the NIMBY homeowners is a f…

It's a completely artificial construct that drives up the cost of living and robs the poor with rent seeking. It's called "zoning", and it's a perfectly natural construct. And if you're going to be fair, you'd acknowledge that ultimately it presents a set of tradeoffs , with both positive and negative impact. All of California's inequality problems go back to that. Inequality is a very complex problem, with many forc…

> It's called "zoning", and it's a perfectly natural construct.

No particular implementation of zoning law is a "natural construct", and USian zoning laws have an extremely particular focus on preventing the construction of high-density housing (hell, some jurisdictions even criminalise roommates in pre-existing housing). There's nothing natural or inherent about that; and plenty of other countries have more sensical zoning laws that provide for adequate and dense housing supply while still having zoning (and they have lower rents and less problems with homelessness and housing-cost induced poverty, gasp).

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