I 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…
It's a fairly easy commute from the city in my experience. BART -> Millbrae or Balboa Park + 15 minute shuttle to the office. Just about every company in SSF that I saw offers some sort of shuttle, and I was at a startup with a much lower cap.
> Good weather The weather in San Francisco is overrated, it's always cold and windy and there are never any seasons.
I'm sorry you're getting blasted for your opinion, especially since it's one I share. I LIKE seasons. I LIKE snow. I LIKE watching leaves fall in the autumn and rebirth in the spring. I LIKE sweaterweather falls and, cold winters, and hot summers. San Francisco's climate has "mild," going for it. It seems to be permanently pants and tee shirt weather (but don't forget your jacket). The summers (sept/oct) are nice, bu…
I also enjoy the seasons, especially as a way to subconciously tick off the years, but I also understand the appeal of SF.
SF's weather is a steady climate without much variance, where it typically only rains two weeks of the year. No freezing temperatures, no heat waves, just a cool climate that doesn't have much variance.
South Bay is similar, but warmer and almost perpetually sunny throughout the year too.
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 a…
I'm not from US and I'm not very informed about the homeless problem. But I wonder why homeless people don't move to another city. If I'd be in their situation (living in a city where I can not afford to rent a house and live a normal life) I'd go to another city where with a regular job I can afford a normal life and just build my life there. Sorry if it's a stupid question.
People who tend to think like you, who can plan in advance, are willing to get a regular job, don't do drugs etc, rarely end up homeless, even in the US. Most of the visible homeless on the streets of large US cities are deeply dysfunctional people, and lower rents or public housing won't make them more functional. Getting them out of public sight would be improvement for the public, to be sure, but the policies of the US cities ran by liberals tend to be extremely ineffective with respect to getting them out of public sight.
> “Taxes don’t have a lot of impact on business decisions. It’s something that has been exaggerated for years” What a laughable comment, as anyone can just look at the overseas behavior of large companies to see how this is false.
Except its going to be 84 and sunny today. Summers are brutal but the rest of the year is pretty nice.
> Summers are brutal Summers in the bay area are not even remotely brutal.
Sorry, I know. It's a very spoiled statement. I mean they're just unexpected in SF (especially the western side of the City).
It tends to be cold, wet, damp, foggy and bone chilling early morning. Not like Winters/Summers in Chicago brutal, but definitely the time I struggle with most (as a new yorker who clearly has to weather acclimated here, I know it sounds ridiculous)
It's right on the freeway, and there's a ferry. I think it's probably about as good as where the AirBnb and GitHub offices are, which are half a mile from BART. I think a lot of their employees are going to be driving in at times that avoid rush hour.
Wat. Airbnb is super well located in soma. Unless Stripe has shuttles it’s going to be rough.
Stripe will definitely have at least limited shuttles from public transit.
The law has you pay taxes of 1% of gross revenue * percentage of global employees working in an SF office. Even if the headquarters moved (and I'd guess it is already a Delaware registered company legally), they'd still have to pay.
Wouldn't this allow another tax dodge, where hiring employees to do nothing in the lowest-cost area you can find winds up saving more money in SF gross receipts taxes than they cost in salary? For example, if you have $10M/yr in tax incidence and 100 employees all in SF, you could have an on-paper workforce of 1000 Nigerians at the national median wage of roughly $1k/yr, saving $9M/yr in taxes.
It's based on payroll cost (including non-cash compensation), not headcount.
Articles 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?
> Lol, what? San Francisco taxes revenue of businesses that are there?… This is just....staggeringly stupid. It just penalizes low margin businesses, for no reason. How can anyone possibly think this is a good idea?
I don’t think anybody thinks that either the gross receipts tax (with different rates depending on industry) or the payroll tax (which included stock exercise in payroll) were good ideas. They are inferior alternatives to property taxes (which are capped and distorted by Proposition 13) and income taxes (which RTC 17041.5 prohibits local governments from raising).
South SF is far less accessible than Stripe's current location in Townsend St (Soma, SF). I'm curious to see how many people leave because of this move. Tech workers in SF tend to live in Soma or the surrounding neighborhoods (FiDi, Mission, Dogpatch), which means for a worker without a car, their commute was previously a short bike, Muni, or Uber Pool, whereas to get to SSF they'll be looking at this (to get to a BA…
This. The major reason why I live in SOMA, and put up with all the significant downsides of that neighborhood, is because it means my commute is very short. It also means I have significant job and networking opportunities within a 30 minute _walk_ from home. When I was last looking for a new role, I didn't even consider anything outside of SF.
I mulled over this for a while and figured that I should be grateful.
This whole situation appears to be lifting IT salaries all over the world. I'm currently in the middle of switching jobs and found that I sneer at positions that pay less than ~$50k (in Poland at that) or don't offer fully remote work.
I mean, taxing payroll is just as stupid. You tax net income, because it's normalized across businesses. Taxing payroll or revenue is just economic nonsense.
Net income isn't normalized across businesses. Most businesses aim for net income. Most startups don't even try, even if they've raised hundreds of millions of dollars and occupy fancy offices. (It's also very easy for IP-based businesses to shift where income is generated.) And that's the basic reasoning behind SF's gross proceeds tax. It's a uniquely SV tax that only works because so many unicorns built their house…
Net income isn't normalized across businesses.
Yes, it would be great if we could have some kind of Generally Accepted Accounting Practices that would specify what counts as net income and what doesn't.