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San Francisco could collapse – what should California do about it?

sfchronicle.com

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Re: San Francisco could collapse – what should California do about it?

#101

Post by Mountain_Skies »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #53
thot_experiment wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

after the huggingface event last night a group of us wasn't let into a bar/club because "y'all are nerds, we don't want your patronage" I don't think it's solved enough yet for their taste, what a beautifully schizoid city, never change, we should just throw money at the problem forever as a monument to hubris XD

The resentment happening from society towards us is spiraling out of control, and I say this as someone who was also at that meetup event yesterday. Pretty sad but we should expect it given how fast AI is going to hurt a lot of these people. The world is finding that they want to always treat us nerds how they treated us in our formative years...

It turns out the arrogant shitting on the rest of the planet by authoritarian techies in the Bay Area has some mild consequences about a dozen orders of magnitude less than the shit it has sprayed on everyone else. If "Flyover Country" has ever been in your vocabulary for a nanosecond, you deserve all that's being heaped on you and 1,000,000x more. You can't abuse humanity, tell them it's for their own good, and then whine when there's a slight bit of blowback against your arrogance and attempt to control and micromanage everybody's lives through technology.

Re: San Francisco could collapse – what should California do about it?

#102

Post by pessimizer »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #8

New York of the 1970s [1] is a better analogy than 9/11. San Francisco is going broke. Not because of terrorism, but due to its own devices. It will need to be bailed out. When that happens, the state will take over and face the realities its voters choose to ignore. [1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-night-new-york-...

New York of the 70s was one of the most culturally fertile moments in history. Imagine artists being able to afford rent.

Re: San Francisco could collapse – what should California do about it?

#103

Post by SyzygistSix »

jleyank wrote: post #28
baron816 wrote: post #4

It all comes down to housing. If you make it affordable to build housing, you make housing affordable. If you make housing affordable, then you make services affordable.

I wonder whether homeowners talking about more affordable housing realize that includes their own house likely declining in value….

That's why so many people oppose multi-family housing, even so-called progressives.

Re: San Francisco could collapse – what should California do about it?

#104

Post by dragonwriter »

dangrover wrote: post #76
jeffbee wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the fact that Prop J cruised to victory and Prop I went down in flames shows that the influence of the old guard is waning. There is a proliferation of groups trying to flex tech money in SF politics: Grow SF, Abundant SF, Together SF. And they are aligned with state politicians who get the goods like Weiner, Newsom, and Haney. Supervisor Peskin is termed out, again, in 2024 and Preston and his band of fake-a…

Tech money should be flexed in politics more. We’re paying taxes too, right?

There has literally never been a time in the history of capitalistm when capitalist wealth from any industry wasn’t being flexed in politics for the interests of the particular capitalists (and, as a natural collateral effect, the industry) involved.

Re: San Francisco could collapse – what should California do about it?

#105

Post by decremental »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #42
lkjwelkjlk3t wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Downvote all you want You called for violence against a public official. Also: “Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading” [1]. > Did Weiner not help pass a bill to legalize raping underage boys? Did they? Provide a source. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Yeah he wanted to make it legal for underage gay boys and older gay men to have sex. That guy pushes all kinds of weird sex stuff related to kids.

Re: San Francisco could collapse – what should California do about it?

#106

Post by pessimizer »

cubefox wrote: post #66
ppeetteerr wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Just look at Twitter. It's running with a skeleton crew but that's only because a system of that size does not collapse in a day. It takes years for the cracks to show and grow.

Well, this is off-topic now. Twitter had hundreds of developers, Mastodon has ... four. Recently they had just one. It seems Twitter was simply overstaffed.

> Twitter had hundreds of developers, Mastodon has ... four. Recently they had just one.

This can't be posted enough. Twitter currently employs 100x more developers than Mastodon. It's comically incoherent to claim that people should move from Twitter to Mastodon because Twitter obviously can't be run by half or a third of the developers that it used to have, because scale or something.

Re: San Francisco could collapse – what should California do about it?

#107

Post by [deleted] »

jleyank wrote: post #28
baron816 wrote: post #4

It all comes down to housing. If you make it affordable to build housing, you make housing affordable. If you make housing affordable, then you make services affordable.

I wonder whether homeowners talking about more affordable housing realize that includes their own house likely declining in value….

[deleted]

Re: San Francisco could collapse – what should California do about it?

#108

Post by ghaff »

bdcravens wrote: post #61
marcellus23 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cities can come back after the decline, too. Look at NYC.

True, given the local industry. NYC has finance, marketing, fashion, etc. What would San Francisco's be? As an outsider, it feels to me like the days magical tech synergy has left, and that work in our industry is unlikely to recentralize.

Was SF ever really a tech city? I mean it can't avoid Silicon Valley's penumbra, tech events and conferences, and a few large presences like Salesforce. But SF isn't really a tech city like Manhattan is a finance city. (Indeed, SF is probably at least as much of a West Coast financial and law center as it is tech.

Re: San Francisco could collapse – what should California do about it?

#109

Post by chmod600 »

To do what NYC did and bring more residents into downtown (rather than just offices), SF needs to be an appealing place to live.

NYC tries to make itself an appealing place to live. SF does not. I'm not sure quite what SF is optimizing for, but "pleasant" is not it.

Even if crime is "just" theft and broken windows, it's still an unpleasant day (or week) when it happens. Enough of that and people just don't want to live there.

Re: San Francisco could collapse – what should California do about it?

#110

Post by kevingadd »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #97
kevingadd wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Home value does not (generally) matter to you day to day if you plan to actually live there. Hell, if the value of your home goes down that could lower your property taxes! Of course in the US, homes are first and foremost an investment, so losing resale value is one of the worst things that could happen to a homeowner, or something.

> Home value does not (generally) matter to you day to day if you plan to actually live there. Until you retire or for other reasons find yourself living on a fixed (and possibly diminished) income, while property taxes based on home value continue to rise.

That would make your home value going down a good thing, wouldn't it?
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