251–260 of 312 posts
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I've lived in New York. Why would anyone want San Francisco to become like that? Is NYC cheap, clean, free of homeless people? No, it is crowded, smelly, expensive, and only livable for the extremely wealthy.
The mistake here is assuming that if SF grows it must become NYC. What if it could be better? There are many other even higher density cities than NYC in the world with much better policies and quality of life. Look to those.
Sure, SF has better weather than we do. But this year we had 6-7 ft of powder in mountains a 30-45 minute drive away. Homes with 5 bedrooms and a quarter acre are $350k. We have plentiful public parks, tons of museums, and great utility prices. Oh and my SF salary means I can fly/live elsewhere for the 2-3 hottest and coldest weeks of the year, whether or not I take that as PTO.
This SF company pays me more than local Utah companies would, but probably less than many of their SF-based employees. Win-win all around. They gave me a standing desk, 4k monitor, all the supplies. I get an office with a door and plenty of space for my plants. I don't even use headphones - I just have a receiver and some Onkyo speakers.
This is my second remote job and everywhere I look more and more companies are moving to a distributed working model. It just so much more financial sense than giving 1/3 of your own revenue to landlords, as well as the huge portion of employee salaries that go to landlords as well. Out here in Utah a company's budget can go to actually building the product. Pretty soon all the "San Francisco companies" will have to compete with others that can strongly undercut them on price due to not having "San Francisco overhead" but still have amazing talent.
My favorite thing about it: heads-down time. Folks interrupt me far less and I just get to hide away in my office and code for hours at a time. The only downside here is that I need to schedule time for explicitly socializing: I have 3 separate "lunch" groups that I attend at least once a week and I fly into SF quarterly and spend that week almost entirely socializing.
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How is it that so much aggressive political rhetoric related to race and the tech industry is coming from this area if there are very few African Americans there in the first place? I live in Atlanta where the minority population is much higher all around and I don't get the sense at all that there's rampant racism or discrimination. Is this problem unique to the Bay Area or is this largely white guilt?
Can you give examples/evidence of this "aggressive political rhetoric" coming from "this area"?
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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.
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How is it that so much aggressive political rhetoric related to race and the tech industry is coming from this area if there are very few African Americans there in the first place? I live in Atlanta where the minority population is much higher all around and I don't get the sense at all that there's rampant racism or discrimination. Is this problem unique to the Bay Area or is this largely white guilt?
Have you paid attention to the “cityhood” movement in Atlanta, where white people are using their friends in state government to split themselves off from the black neighborhoods in their towns?
In the context of this argument, I think it's worth distinguishing between private and public actions. People have the right to be racist, governments don't.
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How is it that so much aggressive political rhetoric related to race and the tech industry is coming from this area if there are very few African Americans there in the first place? I live in Atlanta where the minority population is much higher all around and I don't get the sense at all that there's rampant racism or discrimination. Is this problem unique to the Bay Area or is this largely white guilt?
Hmm. A few points. 1) I don’t know what “aggressive political rhetoric” is, but it comes off as being dismissive of political opinions you disagree with 2) SF the city is a small part of the SF Bay Area. There are lots of black folks living near SF 3) Be very careful making projections about racism from your experience of Atlanta. Atlanta is the catch basin for successful black business for a large fraction of the so…
3. I use Atlanta because that's where I live today. I've lived in Texas, Hawaii, Korea, Maryland, Wisconsin, Ohio, Alabama, and Georgia.
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How is it that so much aggressive political rhetoric related to race and the tech industry is coming from this area if there are very few African Americans there in the first place? I live in Atlanta where the minority population is much higher all around and I don't get the sense at all that there's rampant racism or discrimination. Is this problem unique to the Bay Area or is this largely white guilt?
> I live in Atlanta where the minority population is much higher all around and I don't get the sense at all that there's rampant racism or discrimination. When you say "minority population," are you referring to white people or some other minority group in Atlanta, or are you referring to black people, who constitute the majority ethnic group in Atlanta?
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I lived in Brooklyn, during an enormous construction boom, and ended up getting driven out by gentrification as the neighborhood got overrun with high-end condo buildings.
Yea, that sucks. The edges of Queens and Brooklyn are hardly less expensive than most of Manhattan. They're really big boroughs though, and living in Flushing or Forest Hills for example is still quite affordable as is deeper Brooklyn. But now that I think about it, it really is a matter of "when", not "if" the neighborhoods further from Manhattan get too expensive. I'll agree with you in like 5-10 years :[
I fantasize about winning Green card someday and moving to USA
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maybe 1/2 of my friends from college live in SF. I have a huge social network here. Objectively the city is not awesome, but I can't imagine moving somewhere else and starting from scratch. Lots of tech workers are in this situation IMO.
Isn't it normal to graduate college and move to another city for a job? I've never heard of anyone wanting to stick around the same city as their college friends before. Granted the Bay Area is a tech hub so that's a reason to stay if you're in the industry but living in a new city on your own is definitely an experience most people should have.
At this point I would be somewhat saddened to move away from a network I've been building for ~15 years.
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This, and other statistics like it, are really disingenuous and framed for a very specific interpretation. Here is the actual quote from the article (strikethrough is in the original - not sure why - maybe a bad stat ?): "The vast majority of the people who are homeless today used to be housed – in San Francisco. According to the city’s 2015 homeless count, 71 percent of the people on the streets were living in San F…
yeah, not sure what happened with that link on their site. SF Gov seems to have moved the report. Here's a breakdown by St. Anthony's: https://www.stanthonysf.org/san-franciscos-2015-homeless-cou... (to be clear this is from 2015, so nearing 4 years out of date)
"Survey results show that 71% of respondents were living in San Francisco when they became homeless, and of those, 49% had been living in San Francisco for 10 years or more."
This sheds very little additional information. This statistic is often presented as if 71% of the homeless had their own apartment before they became homeless, but for all I know (and what I suspect) is that many of these people were "housed" in very tenuous, precarious situations that I might, personally, find indistinguishable from homelessness. We really need to know the specific definition of "housed" used in this survey.
That 49% of those 71% were physically present in SF for 10 years or more also tells us very little. I am led to believe that homelessness and the mental illness(es) that lead to it are cycles and that people fall in and out of ... the statistic, however, is presented as if individuals were happily housed in a plain old apartment for 10+ years before lightning struck and they were suddenly strung out on the street...