Can't wait until we learn how to work remotely. Would save a ton of resources.
Stripe to move to South San Francisco
101–110 of 441 posts
Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco
#102As someone who has worked in South SF for years, it is pretty bad for employees. It is a cultural wasteland with few restaurants or interesting things to do. Transit is also poor as both BART and Caltrain are in awkward locations. And the fog is worse. This will be like Uber’s move to Oakland, which got rolled back pretty quickly
North of the GG Bridge has great restaurants and plenty to do. More tech companies should move up there, I don't understand why they usually go south of SF. Also, real estate can be found that are still within a range middle class can afford.
Marin is over an hour away by bus from SF, with no train or BART. Basically to work in Marin you have to live in Marin, so any company that moved there wouldn't be taking advantage of the SF/South Bay labor market.
Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are you talking about? It specifically talks about it and even provides 2 quotes with contradicting points of view: “Alex Tourk, spokesman for sf.citi, a tech business group, said San Francisco needs to consider changes to its business taxes. The city is currently reviewing the tax system, which brings in a total of $1 billion annually. But those taxes could climb higher under the revised system. “Unfortunately,…
I doubt the wages are going to be appreciably different in South San Francisco. Office rents is probably one reason, but the gross receipts tax is almost certainly the biggest reason for the move.
There’s also the impact of Prop M, which caps new office square footage created yearly. Stripe may not be able to find contiguous space big enough for their expected growth even if they wanted to stay in San Francisco.
Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco
#104Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco
#105I can tell you recruiting for South San Francisco was way harder than recruiting for SF. If I lived in SF without a car, that'd be a deal breaker for me. They're going to start losing people, or see a huge spike in chronic working from home. I guess they have to move somewhere at some point, and no move is without trade-offs. Regarding the gross receipts tax, couldn't they just move their HQ-on-paper to any place tha…
I'd say that's an exaggeration. I know tons of people who commute from the city to south bay and vice versa. Plus South SF is pretty well connected by transit.
No where in the Bay Area is ‘well connected’ by any kind of transit.
Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco
#106Articles misses that this is in response to SF's gross receipts tax. Payment processing is an ultra low margin business, no way they can compete while paying ~1% of revenues to the city.
Also, the tax oddly targets Stripe and Square. People don't talk about this very much. But it seems extremely unfair that Stripe/Square pay way more tax than Saleforce in terms of ratio to their revenues. (I don't recall the numbers. Anyone?) Jack Dorsey tried to raise this point multiple times. But people just kept screaming that he didn't care about homeless :S
The gross receipts tax was Jack Dorsey's idea. As CEO of Square he lobbied for and received a switch to the gross receipts tax in 2012.[1] He only started complaining about "fairness" when it became about helping the homeless.
[1] https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/SF-Citi-video-plugs-...
Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco
#107Articles misses that this is in response to SF's gross receipts tax. Payment processing is an ultra low margin business, no way they can compete while paying ~1% of revenues to the city.
Lol, what? San Francisco taxes revenue of businesses that are there? I had to google it to check because I couldn't believe a city would actually do something that stupid. But it seems its real:
https://sftreasurer.org/business/taxes-fees/gross-receipts-t...
This is just....staggeringly stupid. It just penalizes low margin businesses, for no reason. How can anyone possibly think this is a good idea?
Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a credit card that gives me 1.5% cash back on every transaction. I'm reading that Visa typically charges 2.3% to merchants, and Stripe charges 2.9%, ignoring per-transaction fees. So Stripe itself probably gets around 0.6% of each transaction, and at least on average 1% of each transaction goes to cardholder bonuses, and the card issuer gets around 1.3%. Of course both Stripe and the issuer have some fraud pre…
Your conflating fees charged to Merchants (by processors) and rewards offered to Card Holders (by issuers). While often the same bank performs, or is a partial owner involved in, both processing and issuing, the percentages you quote are largely disjoint. > I'm reading that Visa typically charges 2.3% to merchants ... The Discount Rate[0] a Merchant pays varies significantly based on the line-of-business, charge-back…
Again, issuer costs have no bearing on Merchant fees nor the profitability of processors.
If this is true, then where does the cash back come from if not as a cut of the merchant fees?
Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
And homeless are everywhere.
> > The feel of San Francisco is already lost, when a small single apartment runs $3000 a month. > And homeless are everywhere. Maybe a $3k per month "small single apartment" contributes to "homeless are everywhere."
When people say “homeless are everywhere” regarding SF, they’re probably referring to the extremely troubled people who are conspicuously doing drugs or screaming incoherently on the streets. I don’t think those people would suddenly be fine if only the SF apartments were $500 a month instead of $3000.
Of course, there are a lot more homeless people in SF than the very conspicuously unwell people I mentioned. There are also probably larger scale effects that together contribute to high rents, high income inequality, drug abuse, lack of medical care, etc. But there’s a lot more to say than that SF’s homeless problem is because rent is too high.
Re: Stripe to move to South San Francisco
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But people just kept screaming that he didn't care about homeless JFC, it's not because of a lack of money that SF has a problem with homeless people, and it's not that more money would make the problem magically go away.
It’s a national issue and SF is a symptom. Instead of pushing for healthcare, housing, more aids, and so on, people are just blaming it on mental health.
Your premise doesn't align with the facts.
Poverty and homelessness are near all-time lows in the US right now, comparable to Canada. You wouldn't know that by looking at the streets of San Francisco (or Los Angeles for that matter).
At a national level homelessness has declined dramatically since 2000. While San Francisco's problem has only kept getting worse. The US as a whole isn't seeing the homelessness problems that San Francisco is.
While San Francisco was doing nothing, the US implemented the Housing First program under the Bush Administration. That policy was continued and amplified by the Obama Administration, to extraordinary results: homelessness declined through the great recession, rather than skyrocketing as would have been predicted (especially coming out of a housing bust).
Unsheltered homelessness is down 20% since 2007. Total homelessness is down by 15% since 2007.
https://www.hud.gov/sites/dfiles/Main/images/hudno.18-147.jp...
2010 > Obama builds on Bush success to help the homeless
https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2010/...
2013 > The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development reported that the number of the chronically homeless declined by 30% between 2005 and 2007. You might have expected the numbers to spike again when the financial crisis hit but no. Since 2007, the number of chronic homeless has dropped another 19%.
https://www.cnn.com/2013/04/29/opinion/frum-less-homelessnes...
2008 > On a cold January morning in 2001, Mel Martinez, who was then the new secretary of housing and urban development, was headed to his office in his limo when he saw some homeless people huddled on the vents of the steam tunnels that heat federal buildings. "Somebody ought to do something for them," Martinez said he told himself. "And it dawned on me at that moment that it was me." So began the Bush administration's radical, liberal — and successful — national campaign against chronic homelessness.
https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article...
2013 > The Astonishing Decline of Homelessness in America
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/08/the-ast...