261–270 of 312 posts
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> 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?
Indians, Koreans, Vietnamese, blacks, etc.
The author draws a very unsubtle if not direct line between housing costs and homelessness. Is there any? I was under the impression that most of the homeless are mentally ill and/or transplants from other areas. What percent of them just can't afford the rent?
There seems to be lots of people as you say, but I'm sure if rent was cheap, that would help out a lot. I dunno if you've ever been to the SF Bay Area, but rent is REALLY high. The only reason I stayed as long as I did was I had rent control.
The problems listed by this guy are real: the nimbyism of property owners is insane, and the city bureaucracy (pretty much everywhere in the area -Berkeley was particularly lol) is completely bonkers. I'd also point out that civic groups that should help things, like various homeless advocates, generally seem to make things worse. At one point there was an actual $1000+/month subsidy which paid people to remain homeless. You'd lose it if you got housing! I'm pretty sure Newsom got rid of it (to much howling), but it really stuck with me.
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The argument that Democrats are all the best people who always have a genuine interest for others and the environment has it beat.
I'm sure that matters to you, but I was talking about the form of the argument. It'd be equally stupid if it were something starting with If Republicans cared about free markets or low taxes... It's a completely useless way to preface any statement, signalling useless text to follow. See what I mean?
Politicians dissemble, lie, act hypocritically, mislead voters, and... did I leave anything out? If you want to change their actual behavior, you have to change their incentives. One way to do that is to get the voters to hold their feet to the fire, to get them to act consistently with the values that the voters elected them to embody. (Which gets us back to "X is acting inconsistently..." being a perfectly valid thing to say.)
But the problem can run deeper than that. The voters themselves may mouth certain values, but actually desire things inconsistent with those values. At that point, the politicians are embodying the desires of the voters; the problem is the voters' hypocrisy. Once again, though, pointing out the hypocrisy is about the only way to try to attack the problem. (Changing the voters' incentives would almost always require the voters' acquiescence...)
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I've lived in New York. So have I. Why would anyone want San Francisco to become like that? It would be a significant improvement. NYC is far from perfect, but it has semi-affordable rents (outside of Manhattan), semi-functional transit, and much less excrement.
Nearly all of the subway lines were built many decades ago when construction costs were much cheaper. It’s basically impossible for San Francisco to ever build such a comprehensive system at this point. Consider that they just spent $2 billion on a train station that doesn’t have any train tracks serving it and was only open for six weeks before it was closed because it was found to be structurally unsound. If they d…
This can't be anything other than corruption or incompetence. There is absolutely no way it can possibly cost that much. The new One World Trade Center (Freedom Tower) cost about $3.8 billion, so almost twice that, but that should give you a scale... and this was done in a city not known for cheap construction costs.
SF's development and planning culture is just epically bad.
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The utopia created by hackers on this very site
2/3 of my coworkers don't even vote, so it's not quite created by them in the way you imagine.
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apples and oranges. Houston is over 600 sq miles, the metro area is 1000S. If you’re going to compare SF and Texas, start with Highland Park, Bunker Hill, 78746 or the Montrose.
Houston's answer to affordability is sprawl, which has some big problems of its own. But add housing they do, something the Bay Area has failed miserably at.
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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 :[
No, not that much in the future. I have a friend who has lived in Flushing for many years. Not long ago they were thinking about getting a bigger apartment, but even with the equity they have, they couldn't do it. It was cheaper for them to buy a weekend place outside of the city. And Flushing is already way the fuck out there.
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> I've lived in New York. Why would anyone want San Francisco to become like that? Yeah, I'd hate for SF to be a world class city.
It's not now?
You are kidding right? The only city in US that even compares to world class cities (London, Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Sydney even Shanghai, Paris) is NYC.
SF is beautiful and amazing in its own right but world class is different. Start with public transportation to be world class.
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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'm guessing the lust billboard guy made their sign as a response to the adult entertainment billboard guy, and the two don't share that much in common.
Right. It's quite unlike San Franciscans virtue signaling about equality but then trying to end the school lottery system.
Also, people need to stop accusing others of virtue signalling, because they're just virtue signalling about being above virtue signalling.