Are The Techno Riche Really Ruining San Francisco? Yes, Says Rebecca Solnit

> In another era, the captains of industry would have said, “OK, our workers live here, our factory is there; let’s encourage, enforce, and subsidize the improvement of public transit.”

Uh, what?

This is kind of a silly point, but I think it exemplifies how misplaced all this tension is.

For example, mayor LaGuardia put a TON of work into forcing the privately owned transit lines to become a public good in NYC. The "captains of industry" didn't improve public transportation - they just started their own transportation companies. It took a lot of hard work by a lot of great government officials for the NYC subway to become the awesome service that it is today (incoming jokes about the L train).

The city of San Francisco's biggest enemy in this whole "nouveau riche" problem is the city of San Francisco. But everyone's too busy cuttin' each other's throats to realize that.

Is it just me or does it make less sense to blame a group of people for having jobs well-paying enough for them to afford living in San Francisco than to blame city zoning laws which have rather unreasonably constrained the supply of rented units and driven prices to what they are now?

That's true, but just take a look at this BART map:

http://ctchouston.org/blogs/christof/wp-content/bart_row.jpg

The purple lines are the tunnels. The yellow lines are the stations built along freeways. Only the tiny non-purple, non-yellow fragments were built where the actual demand is.

(Source: http://www.ctchouston.org/intermodality/2006/05/06/tale-of-t...)

Yes, but the anger at the Google buses and the people who ride them is misplaced. These people really don't want to be paying $3000 per month for housing, and they have no power. In fact, many would be happy to live in low-COL regions (instead of cramming into SF) if it weren't for the career-limiting effects (at least at Google, you have to work in MTV if you want a decent shot at getting a real project; there are good projects elsewhere, but far fewer of them.)

Google's rank and file are not the bad guys. Irritating them does no good to anyone. When poor proletariat fight somewhat richer proletariat over their rides in "luxury buses", the real bad guys win. Divide and conquer.

The real bad guys aren't "techno riche". They invest in and manage software companies, but they don't know (or care) about technology. They couldn't write a line of code to save their lives. Those software execs making $250k++ per year while working 11-to-3 are MBA-culture colonists (Damaso Effect) who came in because we, as technologists, failed to prevent them from conquering us and drawing off almost all of the wealth we produce. We're very good at busting our balls (and ovaries) to solve hard technical problems, but we're terrible at protecting our own interests, especially as a group.

>>The problem is that there are few other nucleation sites that a viable tech community can condense around.

What? There are lots of places that could fill this role.