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The Street Kids of San Francisco

blog.priceonomics.com

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Re: The Street Kids of San Francisco

#81

Post by wpietri »

angersock wrote: post #18

Anybody remember the article a few days ago with the author complaining about the Google bus and the invasion of tech folks into the Bay Area and how they weren't improving the community? And how a lot of people were like "Hey, well, it's putting wealth into helping San Francisco!". Well, how's this fit into that calculus?

It's definitely a mixed bag.

Rents here are now incredibly high. If you talk to residents who got here decades ago, people like this wouldn't have been sleeping on the streets back in the day. They would have clubbed together to get a crash pad. But that's implausible now.

Those high rents are being driven by the tech boom. There are a lot of startups in SF, and the various peninsula buses have made it much more plausible to live in SF but work in Mountain View. Building managers near GBus stops have flat-out told me that Google buses are a big driver in rising rents.

Re: The Street Kids of San Francisco

#82

Post by lotso »

jumby wrote: post #3

Sounds like fun for about 1-2 weeks, and then it would be a sucky life. Gotta have mental stimulation sometime.

Being able to read books, meet new people, and reflect all day, every day seems more mentally stimulating in certain ways than working in the same field for 5, 10, 20, 30 years.

Re: The Street Kids of San Francisco

#83

Post by pm90 »

I can't see a community like this surviving if a lot more people join in. The article describes someone refraining from 'panhandling excessively', but if you have more people, there will always be those who think less for the benefit of others

Re: The Street Kids of San Francisco

#84

Post by moxie »

Locke1689 wrote: post #72
moxie wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious to know why you see them as a guest in your home, rather than the other way around?

Presumably because he either pays property taxes or pays rent to someone who uses it to pay property taxes. Fundamentally, one can see people living on the street as belonging to a complex subgroup in our society: one which can be both symbiotic and parasitical. It is symbiotic in the sense that it provides a culture with which many can identify, especially those who have experienced hardship or difficult home lives…

There's an old wobbly story: A wobbly was riding a freight train across the midwest one summer, in between jobs. The train sided out in the middle of nowhere, and it was scorching hot, so the wobbly got off the train and started walking down a dirt road.

After a couple of miles, the road passed by an apple orchard. The wobbly hopped over the fence, and sat down to rest under the shade of a big apple tree.

The wobbly sat there enjoying the shade for 20 minutes, until a farmer came across him. "You can't be here!" exclaimed the farmer, "This is my land!"

The wobbly looked up at the farmer and asked "Really? What makes it your land?"

"What are you talking about you dirty tramp, I inherited it from my father!" replied the farmer, almost bewildered at such an indignant question.

"Hmm, and what made it his land?" asked the wobbly.

"Why, he inherited it from his father!" replied the farmer, now really angry. "It's been in my family for three generations!"

"And what made it your grandfather's land?" asked the wobbly.

The farmer, now barely able to contain himself, yelled proudly "Why! My grandpappy fought the indians for it!"

The wobbly nodded, stood up, pulled back his sleeves, and replied "Uh huh. Then I'll fight you for it, right now."

The point being that a lot of these conceptions about who belongs and who doesn't are based on private property, but that there fundamentally isn't any real justification for private property. Even John Locke's attempts to justify it break down.

I can understand two groups being in conflict with each-other, but I can't understand conceptualizing one as the "guests" of the other group simply because they don't own property.

Re: The Street Kids of San Francisco

#85

Post by hindsightbias »

dewitt wrote: post #40

Like another commenter on this thread, I've lived in the Haight for the past nine years. And while the article is interesting and informative, it doesn't quite paint a full picture (literally—the pictures aren't representative, that girl is not a typical street kid by a long shot, she hasn't slept a day outside in her life. Think camo and combat boots and pit bulls, not peace signs and hacky sacks) of the underside o…

Relevant: http://www.hanc-sf.org/next-meeting/the-homeless-bill-of-rig...

Tonight.

Re: The Street Kids of San Francisco

#86

Post by grinich »

moxie wrote: post #54

This article should really be titled "The Street Kids Of Hippy Hill." By going to one place in order to get a feeling for "street kids," they've gotten an extremely myopic view of that scene. The full picture is much more varied. Traveler kids who go to hobo gatherings would never be caught dead at a rainbow gathering. Rainbow family kids don't drink, and alcohol is even forbidden at gatherings (where nothing else is…

Will you write a blog post about this?

Re: The Street Kids of San Francisco

#87

Post by Apocryphon »

spiralpolitik wrote: post #78
SilasX wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably in the "pearls before swine" sense. Long-time natives just don't appreciate how much the influx of tech folks is improving things, nor how few cities would love to have such a "problem".

Thats because the long time natives don't view them as improvements. They view them as outsiders coming in and disrupting their communities eventually driving them (the natives) out. The general consensus in most parts of the Bay Area is that people want things to stay the same as it was the day they arrived.

As a comment on an article about urban expansion put it, "NIMBY liberalism married to Asperger's-induced libertarianism "

Re: The Street Kids of San Francisco

#88

Post by eli_awry »

md224 wrote: post #55
eli_awry wrote: post #16

I'm a 23 year old with purple hair, but I'm also a PhD student at a top 10 university for computer science. I've hung out in tons of squats and punk houses, and briefly been a street kid, but I got a 2380 on my SATs. I lived in a non-residential warehouse for months - months when I was taking Physics, Linear Algebra, Computer Science and Sociology 321 - Class and Inequality. I've dug through dozens of dumpsters, and…

> On the other hand, they're in denial about capitalism. Could you expand on the flaws in their disdain of capitalism? Or, if that's too broad a question, perhaps direct us to some reading material on the subject? I don't mean this in a snarky or side-taking manner... in fact I'm struggling with my own views on capitalism and would love to expand my knowledge on the issue.

So part of the problem is their alternatives to capitalism. Which are mostly primitivist (as in, destroy infrastructure) communist (in the central planning, grey way depicted in i.e. The Dispossessed) or just kinda goofy. As a lifestyle choice, living off the refuse of a bloated and exorbitant society is actually quite sustainable until you need serious healthcare. As something for everybody to do, a new way of governing, it fails because there will be no society from which to absorb the waste. I think efforts to establish autonomous, non-hierarchal, consensus-based organizations or communities within capitalism is awesome. But ultimately, seven billion people are never going to form some totally sweet Zapatista-style worldwide commune. At that scale, the markets are going to be at work. Capitalism is inevitable.

My perspective is that appropriate solutions to this problem involve taxing externalities (pollution, murderous working conditions that cost society), and reducing the cronyism and corruption that breaks capitalism. Also deciding as a society that we are better off if people are not involuntarily homeless or hungry or dying and agreeing on a social contract to provide welfare.

I want to make the world a better place, so I choose to work on making more, better, cheaper, smarter education available to everyone everywhere. And from society's perspective, this is actually a good investment because it increases human capital and also reduces future costs (as educated folks have fewer kids).

I love communist farms and kibbutzim and I can absolutely imagine living on one and participating in one of those societies. And if you hate capitalism, that's a good way to protect yourself from it. But the farms and kibbutzim themselves are still participants in a larger capitalist system.

Re: The Street Kids of San Francisco

#89

Post by [deleted] »

md224 wrote: post #55
eli_awry wrote: post #16

I'm a 23 year old with purple hair, but I'm also a PhD student at a top 10 university for computer science. I've hung out in tons of squats and punk houses, and briefly been a street kid, but I got a 2380 on my SATs. I lived in a non-residential warehouse for months - months when I was taking Physics, Linear Algebra, Computer Science and Sociology 321 - Class and Inequality. I've dug through dozens of dumpsters, and…

> On the other hand, they're in denial about capitalism. Could you expand on the flaws in their disdain of capitalism? Or, if that's too broad a question, perhaps direct us to some reading material on the subject? I don't mean this in a snarky or side-taking manner... in fact I'm struggling with my own views on capitalism and would love to expand my knowledge on the issue.

[deleted]

Re: The Street Kids of San Francisco

#90

Post by eli_awry »

moxie wrote: post #84
Locke1689 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably because he either pays property taxes or pays rent to someone who uses it to pay property taxes. Fundamentally, one can see people living on the street as belonging to a complex subgroup in our society: one which can be both symbiotic and parasitical. It is symbiotic in the sense that it provides a culture with which many can identify, especially those who have experienced hardship or difficult home lives…

There's an old wobbly story: A wobbly was riding a freight train across the midwest one summer, in between jobs. The train sided out in the middle of nowhere, and it was scorching hot, so the wobbly got off the train and started walking down a dirt road. After a couple of miles, the road passed by an apple orchard. The wobbly hopped over the fence, and sat down to rest under the shade of a big apple tree. The wobbly…

Because some people might not know: Wobbly=member of the Industrial Workers of the World, a union opposed to capitalism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Workers_of_the_World . They're over a century old, and are still active.
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