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San Francisco’s Slow-Motion Suicide

nationalreview.com

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Re: San Francisco’s Slow-Motion Suicide

#171

Post by TuringNYC »

kerkeslager wrote: post #147
terandle wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sort of regulations are you looking for? I’m just not sure how regulating a company will end homelessness. Seems like the government should be using taxes to do that.

Well, to start, you have to close loopholes which allow corporations to dodge taxes to even be able to collect taxes to begin with. I'm not sure where you're drawing the line between regulation and taxation; they go hand-in-hand. I don't have enough context to say what's the best regulation to end homelessness in SF, as I have lived more in NYC area and am more familiar with NYC-specific problems than SF, but some id…

I'd add point 0:

0. Allow increase in supply, which fixes most other problems. Stop artificially constraining supply and allow more manhattanization.

Re: San Francisco’s Slow-Motion Suicide

#172

Post by bilbo0s »

save_ferris wrote: post #140
rayiner wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies are not the problem, San Franciscans are the problem. By all accounts, Texas regulates companies less than California. But Texas is at the national average in cost-of-living adjusted poverty rate, despite being a majority-minority state, while California tops the charts in poverty: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevor... . As compared to California, Texas also has much higher rates o…

Where in Texas were you? I live in Austin, which is rapidly becoming a landing spot for Californians looking to get away, and my experience in Texas has been quite different than yours. Segregation was physically built into the planning of the city of Austin[0], and it's pretty apparent if you spend a significant amount of time here. Not only that, but rising cost of living in Austin keeps pushing minority communitie…

Well, segregation is definitely a part of Texas. But what I think he/she was saying was that blacks and hispanics could shop and eat at the same restaurants and shops that whites and asians shop and eat at. Of course they won't live in the same areas, as you said, segregation is a part of life in Texas. But there is more mixing is what he/she was getting at I think.

Re: San Francisco’s Slow-Motion Suicide

#173

Post by refurb »

KirinDave wrote: post #133

This is a National Review opinion article offered as a news piece (as they are wont to do). It features a seamless conflation of SF's problems with Silicon Valley's somewhat corrosive lobbying effects on the urban expansion problems of SF, as if they're the same thing. It suggests that San Francisco's housing problem is NOT directly at the feet of the folks who own the majority of the property, and instead implicates…

This is a National Review opinion article offered as a news piece

What? National Review doesn't do news, it does opinions. And it's pretty upfront about being conservative.

Re: San Francisco’s Slow-Motion Suicide

#174

Post by stevedt »

Funes- wrote: post #146
idlewords wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leaving aside the weird premise of your comment, you're confusing the Bay Area with San Francisco, which are different things. Black communities in the Bay Area are where they are in part because of a very long history of institutional discrimination. Richmond may be the most glaring example—you have a very rich marina district on one side of a freeway, and a very poor one on the other.

>Black communities in the Bay Area are where they are in part because of a very long history of institutional discrimination. I am really interested in this. Could you provide some links, please?

https://www.sfchronicle.com/chronicle_vault/article/When-WWI...

https://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/hidden-monuments-to-r...

Re: San Francisco’s Slow-Motion Suicide

#175

Post by KirinDave »

minikites wrote: post #42
typon wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The utopia created by hackers on this very site

Every action is political and ignoring that reality is how many of these problems are created in the first place. This is why many tech workers "hate politics", they hate having to be responsible for their actions.

Most Americans "hate politics" because they've been socialized to, not because they actually do. "Bureaucracy is bad," is an idea deeply seated in the American psyche.

It's true though, if more of us went to local government sessions, we could probably just utterly dominate the discourse and reject a lot of NIMBYisms outright, and that'd probably result in a lot of political changes.

I myself regret bitterly how much I let my parent's culture influence my opinions on this, and it's only as I get older that I fully appreciate the many toxic and counter-productive ways my fundamental christian socialization has influenced me even as I've struggled to move more left throughout the course of my life.

Re: San Francisco’s Slow-Motion Suicide

#176

Post by vowelless »

wccrawford wrote: post #157
sbzodnsbd wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A black friend of mine lived in Savanah, ATL, NYC and in the Midwest. She said that you find just as many racists everywhere, but she “appreciates” the (urban) Southern racists ones more because they don’t try to hide, so she knows where she stands.

I have to wonder... Do all the southern racists hide it less... Or are there so many blatant racists that the coy ones are a lot harder to detect? I'm sure there are plenty of racists everywhere, but I do find it hard to believe that there aren't more percentage-wise in the south.

I think the west coast passive aggressive types don’t do dog whistling. Southerners do that quite a bit.

Re: San Francisco’s Slow-Motion Suicide

#177

Post by idlewords »

Funes- wrote: post #146
idlewords wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leaving aside the weird premise of your comment, you're confusing the Bay Area with San Francisco, which are different things. Black communities in the Bay Area are where they are in part because of a very long history of institutional discrimination. Richmond may be the most glaring example—you have a very rich marina district on one side of a freeway, and a very poor one on the other.

>Black communities in the Bay Area are where they are in part because of a very long history of institutional discrimination. I am really interested in this. Could you provide some links, please?

If you search on 'redlining' you can find an extensive literature.

Re: San Francisco’s Slow-Motion Suicide

#178

Post by lacey »

Funes- wrote: post #146
idlewords wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leaving aside the weird premise of your comment, you're confusing the Bay Area with San Francisco, which are different things. Black communities in the Bay Area are where they are in part because of a very long history of institutional discrimination. Richmond may be the most glaring example—you have a very rich marina district on one side of a freeway, and a very poor one on the other.

>Black communities in the Bay Area are where they are in part because of a very long history of institutional discrimination. I am really interested in this. Could you provide some links, please?

Unfortunately I don’t recall which podcast it was, perhaps 99% Invisible, but one had a show on this. One of the things they mentioned was that during WW II now-liberal enclaves like Berkeley told the federal government that they wouldn’t allow housing to be built for black shipbuilders, and similarly Richmond refused but eventually relented on the condition they all be moved out at the conclusion of the war.

There were also redlining practices and things like razing and redeveloping the predominantly black Fillmore making it a neighborhood the previous residents could no longer afford.

Re: San Francisco’s Slow-Motion Suicide

#179

Post by [deleted] »

zaroth wrote: post #99
kerkeslager wrote: post #67

The elites of SF and many people on HN are caught in this loop: 1. Companies don't take personal responsibility when they do antisocial things, claiming they can't be blamed, since they are just following incentives in order to compete. 2. Companies follow incentives, and lobby government to incentivize the behaviors that make them the most money (even if those behaviors are antisocial). 3. Government, influenced by…

The companies are also the ones trying to build the new housing atop that laundromat, or open that ice cream shop. I’m not sure how you could read TFA and come away with companies need more regulations? True or not it seems besides the point. The soul of SF is empty as long as the laws and regulations of the city serve only the wealthy. The policies of the overwhelmingly democratic city have created a festering menag…

[deleted]

Re: San Francisco’s Slow-Motion Suicide

#180

Post by rndmize »

> But somewhere in the bureaucratic hierarchy faceless city functionaries administer labyrinthine regulations that benefit the rich over the poor, the old over the young, the here over those to come, the past over the future.

One would think that, given this article comes to us from the National Review, this would be presented as a positive.

Jokes aside, the city and really the Bay as a whole are unlikely to change much. Prop 13 goes unmentioned in the article, somehow, though it remains a core part of the problem; so does the tendency for tech companies to build their headquarters on the peninsula or the west side of SJ. One would think that with the extraordinary amount of wealth floating around the bay that there would be some effort put into making the place better for everyone, ie. the old "changing the world for the better" idea that presumably drives a lot of startups, but I don't see it.

The standard for tech seems to be avoiding the hard problems of politics and long-term local issues that require campaigns and consensus rather than code and servers. I remember finding it striking a couple years ago to see that on the list of corporate sponsors for https://www.spur.org/, Microsoft was donating more money than Google. Perhaps there's another non-profit dedicated to urban planning in the bay that Google prefers to support, but I haven't heard of it. Apple could have considered building their HQ closer to public transport, but last I checked decided to go with tacking on a set of ugly massive parking structures to set the backdrop for their nice shiny new building.

I'm not really sure what should be done. The transient nature of many people that live in SF/the bay means they're unlikely to have an interest in city/area politics, much less take action on it (if they even can - several of my co-workers are on various kinds of visa). I'd guess that in the coming years tech will wax and wane but never really fade and the wealthy will gradually retreat from the public sphere and areas, surrounded by an ever-increasing array of private software functions that replace public services for those that can pay.

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