Google Bus Protesters’ Manifesto: ‘Get Out of Oakland’

Which isn't saying that techies aren't paid very well, even in relation to their cost of living, but rather that absolute salary numbers mean little by themselves. A $60K salary in Manhattan for example is a tough life, whereas a $60K salary elsewhere can be very comfortable.

I mean, here's the thing: housing prices in the not-shitty and already-gentrified parts of the Bay Area are batshit insane. As in, $1100/month for a rented room in a shared house, insane. And for this money you got your own private bathroom, use of the kitchen and backyard, and weekly maid service, because holy crap gentrification. Yet that was actually the cheap deal compared to paying $1200/month to rent a bunk bed in a "hacker house" further away from work via AirBNB.

The only possible good move I see is for the Bay Area to approve massive amounts of housing construction and increased density, but political will is 100% stacked against that move because local governments are almost always dominated by well-off local landowners (who've usually resided in the same single town for decades) rather than by the large population of salariat-class transplants who rent.

I feel like I'm missing something significant here. Renting an apartment is a conscious choice to me, a trade-off between a temporarily-convenient location and long-term stability, or at least that's how I've always approached it in my personal life. It's baffling to me that people will sign a rental agreement for a limited term, and then be so upset at the conditions of that agreement not being guaranteed beyond that term. Perhaps I'm confused about the nature of the complaints? Do you object to rental housing entirely?

Why would the rent be higher if the people that own the apartments didn't raise it? They have a choice in this; they can live the way they did two years ago.

People either need to work near their jobs or be able to commute to them. Housing density is low in most places, so "working-class" people get pushed out of "nice" areas, so they need to commute. Commuting is bad because transit is bad: there isn't an interconnected, pervasive mesh of transit with capillaries reaching into neighborhoods and arteries connecting cities. We've got Bart and Caltrain, but they're each for the most part single corridors, and the local transit doesn't link up well with it. So, taking public transit costs lots of time and money. The alternative that people have is to drive, but there are too many cars on the road, so driving takes lots of time and money. The result is that people feel like they don't have anywhere to go.

I'm not sympathetic to the argument "I've lived here for NN years so I should be allowed to stay living here as long as I want, realities of economics aside".

I wonder if it would help if there were a governing body between county and state that comprised "the bay area". Individual cities and counties have to strike deals between each other to link transit, with all the usual crappiness that politics entails. If a few counties (or cities that aren't in the same county) have a disagreement, do they have any place to air their arguments aside from the state level? People in LA don't care about the bay area's transit problems. People outside the major metro areas (central valley, far-northern california) don't care about the bay area's transit problems.

Part of the problem is that low density begets low density: all those cars need a place to be parked all day while their drivers work, so we have ~40-50% of the space in cities devoted to roads and parking. Further, low density makes mass transit economically infeasible.

I don't have a solution to offer. I can't see a way from where we are to the bay area I dream of, given the state of the economy and the politics involved.

Conclusion: we should collapse the bay area into a point mass. Then everybody gets to live in the nicest digs in town!