471–480 of 622 posts
Trivia note: there are certain words that only appear in headlines. Like "brace" to mean "prepare." (Although I think that one might occasionally show up in normal text.) What else? "eye" as a verb. ("Supervisors eye relaxing building codes")
brace yourself brace for impact you need to brace before squatting
Trivia note: there are certain words that only appear in headlines. Like "brace" to mean "prepare." (Although I think that one might occasionally show up in normal text.) What else? "eye" as a verb. ("Supervisors eye relaxing building codes")
len("brace") == 5 len("prepare") == 7 len("eye") == 3 len("consider") == 8
len("mull") == 4
len("consider") == 8
We're all paying our wages / rent to mega-corps who own everything and don't have to lower rent to become competitive.
I do empathize with the comments complaining about the homeless in Downtown SF. We have a similar problem in PDX and it really does kill any motivation to go downtown. I also visited SF last June and the homeless issue there was INSANE. It is all anyone can talk about! Everybody is pissed off about it! And for good reason, it is miserable for everyone involved! But nothing is being done about it.
The other day i saw a woman covered in filth sitting on the sidewalk with no pants on, staring blankly in front of her. I walked a few more blocks and saw a man writhing on the ground clearly high.
I'm not a "tough on crime" guy. I have a massive amount of empathy for these people who are likely developmentally disabled, or somewhere in life made the decision to do drugs that lead them to living on the street, concerned with nothing but getting the next hit. But the current state of affairs cannot go on.
I'm at a loss of what to do.
On one hand, being poor and disabled ( through birth or drugs ) should not be a crime. Locking them up doesn't help at all. Besides: our jails and prisons are already full of people. We see that with news stories of dangerous people being allowed to leave jail and go on to immediately do more crimes.
On the other hand: are these people entitled to rule the streets? Shooting up junk and leaving their shit anywhere they please? Setting up tents and piling their junk up blocking sidewalks? Raving mad, starving hysterical naked at anyone who slouches by?
Are we not entitled to protecting my city's prosperity from being bled before my eyes? And if so: How? Arresting them and placing them into FEMA camps? Where? With what workforce? Who is going to cook and clean and counsel these people?
Or give them housing. I'm not opposed to this either, but we've kind-of seen the bad side of this before with cabrini green. And again: Where. With whose buildings. In whose neighborhood. With what workforce to maintain them.
People hiss and spit at their local government but in my eyes, we are backed into a MUCH more dangerous corner than a lot of people realize. The holocaust started well before 1939. People all over Europe were shipping the people they don't want around to the next country over. We need federal action, leaving it up to the states isn't working.
NYC is already starting to see office-to-residential (apartments) conversions, even down near Wall Street. Sad that this article doesn't even consider that (I searched for "residen" and found only a single match, for "president". If SF has a surplus of office space and a shortage of housing stock, well the buildings are already built. I don't see why you couldn't do both: Saleforce tower could have some residential f…
What % of office buildings do you think can be converted into residential?
So I don't see why 100% of class A office space couldn't be converted, not that I'm any kind of expert.
Actually that's extra optimistic. Perhaps most skyscraper office buildings, but not the "strip mall style" office buildings common in the Valley.
Other commercial space (retail, warehouse, etc) I would guess very little. For example enclosed shopping malls don't have many windows and it would probably be cheaper just to tear them down. Ditto big box stores. But those vast acres of shopping malls and big box shops could be redeveloped into mixed-use developments.
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Cities already make visitors pay. First there is usually a higher sales tax. Furthermore, many cities have additional taxes on lodging and entertainment. These taxes are quite substantial. Furthermore look at decaying cities in the 70s. The cities weren't subsidizing surrounding areas by providing services. Instead, many businesses and services straight moved out of cities to surrounding areas. So did many people. It…
The ways you list are fine for getting a few extra dollars our of tourists. But there nothing compared the millions who commute in and out daily to work and pay no property taxes. And that's without counting criminals or people with mental health issues or 101 other groups who travel in and become the cities problem.
Ever hear of the protests against Google buses? The young people wanted to live in SF but the jobs were down in Silicon Valley. To attract them, the tech giants bused them from SF to Mountain View, Cupertino, Menlo Park, etc...
Was SF freeloading off of Silicon Valley suburbs then? Your notion doesn't stand the test of history and data.
BTW, the busing is still going on.
Also what percentage of tech workers working in SF lived in SF? From my circle it was around 70%. Do you know who didn't live in SF? Often parents and people who couldn't afford to live there.
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To what benefit though? Surely they're not better off by having to pay power/water costs in the office when people come back, right?
They'll crush employee moral with return to office and blow up productive teams as the technical leaders leave. They'll say to their shareholders they are trying to downsize but they'll be left with an unproductive shell of mediocre/bad unhappy workers. Seeing this here at my work. Everyone good left. Talking about technically excellent peer leaders making 180k but providing millions in value.
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A swing to the Right will often cause a swing to the Left. In Florida, registered Republicans lead Democrats by less than one percentage point as of August 2022, and there are more than 10M women in Florida, half the population, and only 4.5M senior citizens, less than a quarter of the population. It is my optimistic belief that DeSantis' days in politics are numbered, mostly due to his association with a certain men…
And speaking of Puerto Ricans, where do you think all the Hurricane Maria refugees went?
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> inventory of listed homes remains extremely low Those are statewide statistics. Oakland is seeing a ~20% increase in days on market and 5% decrease in price from last year [1]. Population and income shocks hit poor neighborhoods first [2]. [1] https://www.redfin.com/city/13654/CA/Oakland/housing-market [2] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.23...
> Population and income shocks hit poor neighborhoods first Oakland has a Median HH Income of $80k - which is 20% higher than the US median HH income, and above median for California. Oakland as a whole is definitely not poor.
You can have most of a city making minimum wage (~30k pre-tax), but enough CEO's and mil/billionaires to completely skew the medium far higher than it should be.
We need to look at income without the high outliers to get a real sense of the population.
This is why the shocks always hit the poor first- they are the real representation of the population.
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Totally agree. The pendulum is gonna swing back, it's just a matter of time. Yes there will be more remote-first companies but we will see how that pans out over 5 or so years. There is a hell of a lot more to running a tech company than just writing code. Code writing can easily be done from home but there is a lot of other roles where it isn't as easy. Plus, are people really gonna just hunker down in isolation? Ar…
What if, as a compromise, the first step is we get rid of open offices. That would go a long way towards getting rid of a near-universal complaint (at least on HN) about the pre-disease status quo, which WFH has freed tech workers from for a while. > It's kinda funny to me how so many arguments for WFH are centered around the individuals themselves. Many of those individuals may have families who they want to be arou…
Less traffic, especially the early money school --> downtown rush. My office space has poor ventilation, the HVAC is outdated and has no natural light at all. And the less that can be said for my cafeteria food the better. Honestly, if you as a company want my seat in the chair, you do need to provide facilities that make it worth it.
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True to some extent, certainly. But if a cop in Arkansas catches you stealing a catalytic converter, the rest of your day is going to play out very differently compared to how things would have gone in SF.
> But if a cop in Arkansas catches you stealing a catalytic converter, the rest of your day is going to play out very differently compared to how things would have gone in SF. I don't doubt it. I doubt the cops' unsupported claim that said difference is an effective deterrent against the crime.
We'd need some solid numbers on converter theft rates relative to the car-owning population. But even then the numbers wouldn't be comparable, so it'll always come down to my "common sense" versus yours. My common sense says that when cops see a crime in progress and walk away whistling, it encourages further crime... and also discourages the victim from bothering to report it.